Trying out Guix for the first time! Waiting for packages to download.

I'm a long time Arch user. Any tips?!

I've heard there aren't as many packages for Guix as other distros, but I was thinking Flatpak and distrobox will help bridge the gap for me.

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I quit on day two with two takeaways:

– Hardware must be well supported in fully-libre-land - I was trying to install on a Mac Mini and had to go nonguix pretty much right away. That kind of spoiled the whole effort.

– Profound meditation and enlightenment on the essence of Scheme is a must. I had one of those 'no, this is where you don't want a closing brace' moments and my zen was blown out of the water.

I would have soldiered on, but personally I like Arch first and foremost because I can (and do) have a local repo by rsyncing a rotation of mirrors couple of times a week. Just in case the Internet dies one day, you know. I realised Guix was not really suitable for the apocalypse use case, so after that brace episode I decided to stick with what my spine already knows.

After all that is said – I really hope you fare better :D

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago

    Hardware must be well supported in fully-libre-land ... had to go nonguix pretty much right away.

    Yep, same here. I started with nonguix. I didn't realize it was easy to add additional channels.

    Profound meditation and enlightenment on the essence of Scheme is a must. I had one of those ‘no, this is where you don’t want a closing brace’ moments and my zen was blown out of the water.

    Aaaah. I juuuust had this happen to me. Took me a bit to balance the parens again! 😂 Although, so far Scheme seems nicer than Nixlang. I've also had curiosity to learn a functional language, so Guix gives me a reason to learn about functional programming.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    personally I like Arch first and foremost because I can (and do) have a local repo by rsyncing a rotation of mirrors couple of times a week.

    Are these mirrors for prebuilt packages? If not, you should be able to pull from other channels, create your own channel and include all your packages while building them locally.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Sure, but then I'd be downloading every single source 'package' and compiling for both x86 and ARM - not exactly feasible. Keeping just the sources might be an option though. The point is to have the whole repo, not just the packages I use, so that in the SHTF scenario I can help others install Arch and any software they may need on their machines. Muhahaha, Arch will prevail 👻

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I've also wanted to try out Guix for a while.. part of the reason I'm leaving a comment is just so I can recheck these posts later :P

    But when I do I for sure will start out from nonguix because I'm quite confident that my hardware won't be supported (I even have a recently purchased Wifi 7 card that relies on ath12k module that I'm quite sure won't be in the official Guix repo.. maybe I'd even need to compile it myself..)

    I see in the nonguix readme that there's a way to generate an iso that includes already a nonguix kernel, so I'll have a look at that.

    It even looks like you can create a writeable image to run from a USB thumbdrive, which looks very interesting, I gotta try that!

    guix system image --image-size=7.2GiB /path/to/this/channel/nongnu/system/install.scm
    dd if=/path/to/disk-image of=/dev/sdb-or-whichever-drive-is-usb bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync
    

    I've been burnt by Arch before which is what has got me into exploring other distros. I might ultimately end up again in Arch like you, who knows, but it looks like the way Guix works is well suited for hosting your own repo too.. I think I've seen before someone hosting their own Guix repo in github, including also a bunch of configuration for their system, which got me curious.

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