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Removing Guix from Debian

(lwn.net)
137 points 6581 | 7 comments | 02 Sep 25 14:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.687s | source | bottom
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tucnak ◴[02 Sep 25 17:04 UTC] No.45105862[source]▶
It's a shame that yet another project (bcachefs in Linux kernel) and now guix are getting ostracized out of mismanagement... on whoever's part, although in all honestly, and this is a hot take mind you; guix should either be run on bare metal, to take advantage of its bootstrap-from-source, thus avoiding debian in the first place, OR be running as guest, in some fantasical gnu hurd environment, thus forgoing linux.

I say this as a long-term guix user.

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1. giancarlostoro ◴[02 Sep 25 17:25 UTC] No.45106195[source]▶
> I say this as a long-term guix user.

Curious, what is your need / use case? I typically just stick to the package manager for whatever OS I install, if I don't like theirs, I find a new OS.

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2. zelphirkalt ◴[02 Sep 25 18:04 UTC] No.45106816[source]▶
Not the GP, but: For Guix in general? That's easy to answer:

(1) Making things reproducible. That is one of the main reasons. And not only installed system packages. You can also use it to build reproducible projects you develop, if the dependencies are available on Guix.

(2) The other one is installing software, that your distribution doesn't have in standard repos.

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3. trelane ◴[02 Sep 25 18:33 UTC] No.45107172[source]▶
If you install guix as a user, it augments or overrides the software available on your base system.

It helps a lot on Chromebooks, where it's not straightforward to get a recent release.

It also helps to get up-to-date packages if you're a regular user and your admin doesn't have them for some reason (maybe RHEL or Ubuntu LTS.)

Or even just if your admin doesn't have the packages installed.

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4. giancarlostoro ◴[02 Sep 25 18:33 UTC] No.45107177[source]▶
So its similar to Nix? I've heard similar of Nix.
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5. mikepurvis ◴[02 Sep 25 18:55 UTC] No.45107463{3}[source]▶
Nix and guix ("geeks") are close cousins, and both can be an entire OS or be used just to manage a single workspace/project on another OS.

There was a solid piece on here a few weeks ago comparing the two, written by someone with in-depth knowledge of Nix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44569032

6. felixg3 ◴[02 Sep 25 19:28 UTC] No.45107887[source]▶
I feel like that brew, or better yet, nix are great options for userspace applications in Linux and macOS
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7. trelane ◴[02 Sep 25 19:32 UTC] No.45107934{3}[source]▶
Sure, there are other options for this. But this is certainly a use case for guix, which is what the poster was asking about.