Comment by sierkov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sierkov | Hacker News Reader

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> I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS.

I'm using Guix for work, at home, my wife has Guix on her gaming laptop with nvidia card, playing games on steam. Nobody has any problems with enabling rpmfusion repo on Fedora, using aur on Arch, adding backports repo for kde or whatever on ubuntu. But as soon as it's nonguix channel it's suddenly a problem. Huh. It's literally just a channel and ultimately it is still same Guix.

"What's that? NONGUIX? Hell no, I ain't having Guix working on my hardware! I don't want a better experience using Guix! Not in a million years!" And then:

> Guix has truly noble goals (in classic GNU fashion) but they're ultimately misguided.

> Actually useless.

Which are really big claims with nothing to back them up.

> The standard encouraged response to "Hi I'm a new Guix user and I was wondering how I can run steam?" is roughly equivalent to "Go fuck yourself" and I'm just amazed by that.

Look, if you can't figure out how to `guix install flatpak' and then flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam, then... well, I've nothing to say actually.

> well, I've nothing to say actually.

That's definitely better than "go fuck yourself". "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" and all that.

Tbh, I've seen the "go fuck yourself" attitude in almost every Free Software community I've spent time around. It's really just a matter of whether it's encouraged, tolerated, or actively rejected by the project maintainers and influencers.

I would hope that someone writing a blog post this positive would be one of the "actively rejecting" folks, but I really don't know anything about Guix (hadn't heard of it until this post).

I will say that I run NixOS on my primary home server, and while there's definitely a learning curve there, the community I've experienced is largely very helpful, friendly, and positive. Now that I've got most of it working the way I want, I don't see myself moving to something else any time soon (it's absolutely rock solid).

If you're just turning to flatpak, why are you even using guix in the first place?

I assume for them, guix + a few proprietary bits is a better compromise than installing Windows

Flatpak is not an OS. Weird question.

If you've turned to a system based on everything being perfectly declarative and reproducible, why would you then add an imperative autoupdating system on top of that? Of course you can, but if you're fine with that kind of system, why would you have turned to guix in the first place? It's not like it's just the popular default and you want to do something else on top, it's a super niche thing based specifically around this and you're breaking the core philosophy

I had the impression, Guix was a package manager and GuixSD the OS?

It is all just Guix now. It's both package and systems manager.

The OS is called "Guix System". Without the system part it's just "Guix".

Both variants are very similar. The Guix tool comes with a "guix system" command, which lets you build Guix System containers, container images, system images, qemu VM images, qemu VM scripts, etc. The only command that won't work on a "foreign" distro is "guix system reconfigure" --- but that's only a "guix system init /" away ;)

This is precisely my confusion.

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