Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

I like them both, both interesting, quite similar, both with corner cases

Annoyingly both fail at basic stuff like falling back the graphics card, something Debian had solved 10 years ago, no configs needed, no matter Intel/NVIDIA/AMD. Even without the correct driver or firmware falling back to VESA or fbdev should be a given. Never had so many black screens as now. Even Windows has done better job at giving you a basic resolution while you install the drivers

Or maybe it's just the state of the Linux ecosystem, with the introduction of Wayland and NVIDIA open drivers, causing regressions

Also the unintuitive inverse of traditional package management, where if you want to update one package, all the system updates by default

Which increases the amount of bugs, having frequent updates to a stable system

To make it better you can add 2 channels, and call them nixos-stable v24 nixos-latest v25, keeping most of the system one version down increases stability a lot

Of course the incorporated Grub boot build choices is great to revert back to a working system

I really like the the separation Guix makes on having close source being a concern of a separate project

But both of them are equally easy to install open source only or include proprietary

> But both of them are equally easy to install open source only or include proprietary

Unless it really dramatically changed recently, I don't think that's true. Look, here's the official manual page that describes exactly how to enable use of the non-free packages that are right there in the main nixpkgs repo:

https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-allow-unfree

And here's the guix equivalent, maintained in a completely separate repo that you're not allowed to talk about, document, or refer to in any official channels: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

These are not equal.

> Also the unintuitive inverse of traditional package management, where if you want to update one package, all the system updates by default

What do you mean? ins't that exactly the arch way ? (no partial update supported)

In Arch if I needed something updated today you would have done

> pacman -Sy

> pacman -S package_name

Leavig the rest system unchanged

In Nixos

> nix-channel --update

> Add package to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

> nixos-rebuild switch

Which would update everything

Maybe we could do

> nix-channel --update

> nix-env -iA packagename

But I am not sure which version would be installed. And it would definitely go against the purpose of using nixos

> nix-shell -p package_name

It is also quite cool for trying packages without installing permanently

> These are not equal.

Of course they are. Copy and paste a text snippet to your configuration, and run the cli to refresh

Being a separate repo is absolutely OK. Just like installing Nixos's own Home-Manager

Or add other people channels, like adding PPA on Ubuntu/debian. Or run flakes...

Nixos is possibly makes it more confusing by having the documentation recommend `nix-channel --add` instead of the declarative approach. Having the standard declarative, and having flakes on top

And you should probably want to create your own channel. On the week I installed Guix immediately created my channel and packaged ZimWiki