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slgeorge

For those that don't know Guix can be used as:

* a package manager on top of an existing Linux distribution (think apt or rpm)

* a development environment (think Python venv but for any language)

* a VM system (like Docker but declarative)

* a Linux distribution (similar to Nix)

It's a small and friendly community - we recently started an English-speaking online user-group:

  https://www.meetup.com/guix-london/

Next meetup is Monday next week - please come along!

I also did an Intro post to some of the advantages and challenges a couple of years ago:

https://www.futurile.net/2021/09/26/guix-alternative-to-snap...

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"Guix is a rolling release distribution, the versions of each application are updated continuously. The benefit of rolling releases is that enhancements are available immediately"

The last time I looked at Guix a lot of packages were not up to date, and this included security updates for internet facing things (IIRC, one of the major web servers).

New packages and updates to packages come into the archive continuously. For example, in roughly the last 24 hours 40 packages were added or updated - https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/ . Advantage of this is that you can use new packages immediately and there's no big 'upgrade'. Challenges are that if you were an enterprise and wanted to stick on an 'old' version this wouldn't the right distribution.

Guix does receive security updates, and those are added to the archive immediately. I haven't had any problems myself. It's definitely a 'community' project, so you have to enjoy doing a bit of hacking!

> For example, in roughly the last 24 hours 40 packages were added or updated

That's really doesn't feel like a lot. 40 is oughly equal to the amount I get daily for just the stuff that's installed on my arch system.

I do like rolling release distros. I currently use Manjaro and the ARM version of Arch. However, what I really want something like this for is clients servers - not exactly "enterprise" as these are SMEs (not tiny, but not enterprise either).

I did find CVE-2024-0985 was not fixed in Guix, but overall so far other things seem to be up to date than when I last looked at it.

What is your usage? I suppose the other thing it might really good for is a developer desktop?

I use it for additional packages on top of another Linux distribution (Ubuntu). This gets me rolling release packages and guix shell which is great for development as each project I'm working on can be completely separated.

For 'servers' the nice part is being able to prepare a declarative operating system configuration and play with it locally (VM), then it can be deployed to the remote node and you know it's going to be the same. If something goes wrong it's easily to declaratively roll-back. Here's a nice starter post (https://stumbles.id.au/getting-started-with-guix-deploy.html). The deploy capability definitely needs more hoops to jump through and it's not without rough edges - but I think it's really cool. There's active ARM and RISC-V work - I don't know how rough that would be compared to the well-known ARM ports - ask on #guix if you're interested.

Thanks that getting started post looks really useful.

i have recently started running development stuff in VMs (shared folder so I can use my usual editors etc) and this might be a nice alternative - but the biggest draw is that it is declarative and looks easier to get to grips with than Nix.

ARM support is not important to me at the moment - those are just personal things (a tablet, a Raspberry PI) that have limited use anyway.

> * a Linux distribution (similar to Nix)

To nitpick, you mean similar to NixOS. Nix is the package manager, Nix language is the config language that manages the package manager, and NixOS is the operating system created from those two.

> a Linux distribution (similar to Nix)

I'm pretty sure all of these are like nix, right? I've used nix on top of other distros, the development environment thing is like nix-shell, nix is happy to build container images, and of course there's nixos.

Guix was originally derived from Nix. Guix has different goals.

Sure? I'm pointing out that the listed features are more or less identical AFAICT. I grant that being a GNU project affects some of its goals and how it goes about things.

Yes, I wasn't throwing shade on Nix, I was drawing a specific comparison about Linux distributions.

My opinion is that Guix/Nix move the state of the art for Linux distributions forward. So Guix<->Nix are both similar Linux distributions, and different from previous approaches (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc).

Transactional package management and declarative system configuration solve a whole host of problems. Guix (and Nix?) directly integrates configuration management into the OS, rather than as some adjunct piece of tooling (Ansible, Terraform etc). We define the packages, the system, the configuration using the same DSL. Transactions and a declarative approach improve maintainability, reproduciblity and might limit the amount of time I spend messing with different tooling ;-)

Ah, yes, in that case we're in full agreement:) There are pain points yet, but I already find it slightly painful to use a non-declarative system...

With nix i can install free, non-free apps -- the amount of nix-able stuff is a ton. Is Guix only set to install FSF blessed proprietary free stuff?

No. While the core repository (we call that a "channel") only includes free software, there are no restrictions whatsoever on what you can or cannot install with Guix.

Guix makes it trivial to add third-party channels (such as nonguix, guix-science-nonfree, or other free software channels like guix-cran or guix-science) or extend Guix in an ad-hoc fashion.

You can also build an entirely private collection of packages if you want; from a file, from a git repository, from a Guile expression, etc.

No.

Guix is more similar to Debian, with only 'Free Software' applications in the main archive.

For proprietary codecs, firmware and so forth there is the Nonguix channel. Again, this is fairly similar to how distributions like Ubuntu have handled this line in the past.

I need Chrome and also have some games loaded using 'channels' - heh heh - another post:

https://www.futurile.net/2022/12/04/proprietary-apps-on-guix...

A lot of Guix users use Flatpaks.

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Channels.html

https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

Thanks for addressing my ignorance.

> * a package manager on top of an existing Linux distribution (think apt or rpm)

Just to add to this: don't just think apt or rpm, also think conda/mamba, homebrew or pipx. Nix, and I am sure guix as well, unify this "traditional" distinction between system and user package managers.

I used to attend a C++ meetup in my previous city, but since have moved.

I sometimes think about setting something up in my new city.

Do you have any advice for getting a meetup off the ground? I guess meetup is still the best thing to use (it was what my old C++ user group used).

We're a small group 5-10 people, so it's very informal and friendly. I'm sure Fabio (https://fabionatali.com/) who organised it would have good advice! I'll say that from my perspective the fact that it's also virtual is really great as otherwise I couldn't attend!

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