We need more GUIX here. Not using the distro but really interested in knowing more about it. Hype seems to be solely focused on NixOS lately.
I’ve installed it on my dad’s spare laptop, which is a 2019 Celeron machine with just 4GB RAM. It is a pain in the ass if you have non-open source drivers (in my case, the Realtek wifi driver). Building a kernel takes an entire day. Also, there’s no substitute server in Asia, so the download is pretty slow. And Guille is kind of a hard language to learn. At least from what I felt personally.
I heard the opposite, that guille is easier to learn than NixOS language.
Guile and Guix is way better documented than Nix. The language have more features, so you don’t have to use a hack to load packages, can actually know what is accepted in a function instead of blindly copying what others do, and it comes with a formatter.
I find it more intuitive, if that makes sense.
I think the language is harder but more powerful than Nix’s.
Imo a better manual and examples would help a lot.
I’d say one of the biggest issues is the one with proprietary drivers - you can’t really find examples and guides on how to get drivers working because it’s kept hush-hush, and to install them yourself requires knowledge on how to set things up, knowledge which beginner users don’t have ofc.
I’m a big fan of Guix and Guile but atm I couldn’t switch over due to this.Actually the proprietary driver setup is easy. The issue, at least for me is having to deal with a long wait time for building drivers. And besides, I’m not really well educated on how to build kernels. Perhaps, we could strip the useless parts and only include the drivers available exclusively in our system, which could speed up the build. And yes, the language is pretty good, almost similar to OCaml, which I like a lot. And it also fixes the issue of having to deal with external scripts, because personally I like uniformity. Nix package is contaminated with Python, Shell and Ruby script, which is something I don’t appreciate.
Building a kernel
Can’t you just use the standard Linux kernel? You can just tell GUIX to use the standardized kernel in its config file
I need to use the Realtek WiFi card. Guix comes with a Libre kernel, which does not have proprietary blobs. In fact, even Firefox is missing from their repository. GNU folks avoid proprietary software religiously.
You can swap it with the standard one. It’s on another non-official channel called nonguix.
I am using nonguix actually. We still have to build while using nonguix, right? Or is there a pre-built kernel available?
There is a pre built distribution, you need to configure binary cache to get it. Refer to the “Substitute for nonguix” section: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
I try to write about it as much as I can here! There’s also !guix@lemmy.ml
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !guix@lemmy.ml
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=0berTO7d6gg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
