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.

  • tasankovasara@sopuli.xyz
    4·
    2 days ago

    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

    • Ferk@lemmy.ml
      1·
      15 hours 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.

    • a Kendrick fan@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • tasankovasara@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        22 hours 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 👻

    • paequ2@lemmy.todayOP
      2·
      2 days 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.