this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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What are your opinions of Guix? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 10 months ago by CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you don’t have the requisite bare metal to run Guix by itself

That's a bit disingenuous wording as modern hardware that can run without proprietary firmware is an absolute rarity at this point.

The vast majority of people on earth do not have access to such hardware.

The linux-libre kernel is only an issue for Guix System (the analogue to NixOS for Nix)

Point taken. I was talking about the OS aspect of both though, given that @Ramin_HAL9001@lemmy.ml compared it to Debian and Fedora.

The project should have really kept the GuixSD name. Much clearer separation and also sounds a lot better.

package managers who attempt to sweep nonfree software under the rug and try to make the issue invisible.

Which ones?

In Nix, you get a giant red error when you try to eval unfree software and need to explicitly opt-in.

[–] jaeme@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago

That’s a bit disingenuous wording as modern hardware that can run without proprietary firmware is an absolute rarity at this point.

But it's not impossible, nor is it something that can't be solved in the future with CPU architectures like RISC-V.

The project should have really kept the GuixSD name. Much clearer separation and also sounds a lot better.

Agreed.

package managers who attempt to sweep nonfree software under the rug and try to make the issue invisible.

I should have been more clear, excluding nonfree blobs were widely decided to be a lost cause across the distribution space. The final being Debian very recently. Tbh I do sometimes wish that Guix took the Nix approach with hardware-configuration.nix, but the fact remains is that the Guix maintainers do not wish to maintain nonfree packages and I respect that decision as Guix doesn't go out of its way to prevent others from installing the nonfree blobs/packages themselves.