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Removing Guix from Debian

(lwn.net)
137 points 6581 | 3 comments | 02 Sep 25 14:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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msgodel ◴[02 Sep 25 18:14 UTC] No.45106938[source]▶
Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work. I'd imagine maintaining it is even more intense and that's why they're running into issues like this.

You have to be pretty slow to be outrun by Debian of all distros.

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1. spit2wind ◴[02 Sep 25 21:00 UTC] No.45108980[source]▶
What do you mean by "Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work."

Like, as a user downloading packages, or a person packaging an application?

As a user downloading a package, it's been super easy for me and it's been years of running Guix with little to no issue (yet the benefits of rolling release, rollbacks, installing multiple versions of a given software etc.).

As for using it to package an application, I found the challenges mainly in the documentation. This was years ago and a lot of work has gone into improving the docs.

I'm curious what your experience has been.

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2. ocdtrekkie ◴[03 Sep 25 00:49 UTC] No.45111037[source]▶
FWIW, not the OP but doing a guix pull after getting it from APT took several hours to crash out every time I wanted to just try using guix for something, and the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild. I put a couple days into it and never actually got to try it.

It's hard to have an opinion of a platform you haven't used but based on how bloated just starting it seemed to be I was unimpressed.

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3. pxc ◴[03 Sep 25 04:58 UTC] No.45112382[source]▶
> the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild.

For the record, the Guix System install media is less than 1 GB. And the Guix installer from upstream looks to be 100 MB right now.