Reposting because it looks like federation failed.
I was just reading about it, it sounds like a pretty cool OS and package manager. Has anyone actually used it?
The idea behind it really appeals to me. However, Guix is so niche that I felt like it was not worth the effort to actually daily drive it. I went the NixOS way instead and have been daily driving it now for almost 2years. I’m really satisfied with the paradigm immutable and reproducible os. I also manage my servers this way and it makes it really easy to rollback stuff.
The learning curve is the same as for any language but you have to relearn how to manage an os this way as it can be really different than a trad os. It forces you to really understand for example how packages traditionally expect to link to various libs available on your system.
Nix is absolutely horrible as a language, though.
I’m a software developer with almost two decades of Linux experience and still struggle to make sense out of the structure. I can eventually get everything to run, but I don’t understand why and that’s extremely concerning.
Even simple scripts like flakes don’t work as expected. I tried to set up a simple environment with a bunch of packages (java, maven, etc) and I found about five completely different approaches online , none of which worked. And again: I couldn’t understand why.
The results - once everything works - are impressive, but the way to these results is far too complicated and convoluted. There’s no way, this much complexity is needed by default. That’s just bad design.
So I think Guix (and Nix) is the most technologically advanced package manager in existence, and I hope someday all package managers work like Guix.
One other very interesting feature about Guix (which I don’t think Nix is doing yet) (which Nix also does) is that they have implemented a fully verifiable bootstrap, meaning every step of building the kernel, including the steps taken to build the C compiler toolchain, are produced by code that is simple enough for a group of humans to check for correctness and safety. Also, every step of the build process exists in the package repository, with no reliance on externally built binaries for anything, not even the C compiler toolchain. They accomplish this with a multi-phase bootstrap process, where a smaller, simpler C compiler is used to build GCC.
Do I use Guix? Well, no. Simply put, it is not quite to the point where it just works on a lot of the computer hardware that I own. With a bit more work, with a few more developers, and a bit more money invested, Guix could pretty soon become as reliable and useful as Debian or Fedora. But it is not quite there yet. And frankly, I have other more important things to do than worry about debugging problems with the operating system I am using.
I haven’t gnused it, I probably won’t unless I stop using nixos. I haven’t looked into it much, how different from nixos is guix?
It’s like Nix but has some extra features and uses Scheme instead of a custom language.
