99
What are your opinions of Guix?
(lemmy.sdf.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
99 points (95.4% liked)
Linux
48186 readers
1265 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Guix is almost like nix but with scheme, right? Any other differences?
I do like scheme. Nix is quite impressive. But my unpopular opinion is I am not convinced it's philosophy is necessary. Nix feels like a workaround to legacy baggage in POSIX to allow for all its features of full reproducibility of packages and the overall system. Although Gentoo is not exactly reproducible, I feel like the level of control is sufficient to give me the benefits I want.
Nix works for maybe 95% of cases, but the 5% where its workarounds do not work sre annoying to deal with. Gentoo on the other hand doesn't break so much from the traditional unix way of doing things, but still grants the user a great load of freedom and choice.
Based on what I've heard so far: GNU Shepard instead of systemd, a package manager that compiles things from source and allows user-defined compiler options, a totally different way of arranging system files, and Guile-Scheme is used for everything; it sounds like there's no other kind of configuration anywhere.
It also uses Linux-libre by default, although you can go back to plain Linux, and they're working on Hurd.
The biggest difference between Nix and Guix is that Guix doesn’t support non-foss software, meaning you can’t use it as a package manager on other operating systems. I originally wanted to use Guix but use a Mac for work, so that became a deal breaker.
Nix is pretty awesome as a package manager, I’ve been happy with it after the truly unnecessary learning curve brutality. I do not imagine I would ever use the full OS though.