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Comment by rekado | Hacker News Reader

> Guix, being a GNU project, obsessing over nON-fReE

As a long time contributor to Guix I find that the "obsessing" is regularly done by others when talking about GNU. There's enough useful free software out there that needs packaging, and that's what I do. I don't need the extra headache of special snowflake licenses or custom restrictions.

For nonfree software that doesn't have a popular alternative I contribute to guix-science-nonfree. It's barely an inconvenience for users to expressly add another channel to their Guix installation.

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When I used Guix, I needed nonfree for Firefox and the upstream Linux kernel. I also prefer to only use free software, and also like them not including proprietary software.

Needing a channel was a huge inconvenience as you would often pull your channels and stuff would break, as guix was updated but non-guix wasn't. Managing channel manifests was a pain. Firefox would often be months out of date as well.

Moved to NixOS, didn't enable allowUnfree, and had an actually up to date and simple to maintain system. Flakes solves the channels problems too. I had put a lot of effort into making Guix work, but it just had too many usabiltity issues, and the policy on firefox was a major one.

Counter anecodate: I use guix + the nonguix channel for firefox, linux, etc. and it has been smooth sailing for quite some time.

I'm not sure how long ago you used Guix, but in my experience, modern day nonguix is very up to date with Firefox and upstream Linux. Combined with things like Guix shell, time machine, and pinning specific commits, I find things have not broken for me in ways that I couldn't easily resolve in a few minutes in a long time.

I've been using guix since 0.15.0 and haven't seen it as much of an issue. Sure, channels will sometimes be out of sync with the latest commit but that's to be expected given that you're likely not following a version cut but rather the latest commit. It's easy enough to bump the package locally (inherit, etc) or contribute an update which solves this for everyone.

Needing channels for non-free is a feature as the system will be pure by default and can make progress towards fully reproducible builds for all packages rather than having several blessed non-free blobs around that drain maintainance time.

For the record, I use linux-nonfree, amdgpu, iwlwifi, firefox, and steam.

Guix comes with a service for using Nix packages[1], if that's what you want. It's very simple to setup, and would allow you to use Nix's Firefox package without any issue.

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Miscellaneous-Servi...

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