Is there anyone here using it? What do you like and do you hate about it?
Thinking of distro hopping again?
I haven't tried it but along with Guix and Void Linux, it's one of the distribution I'd consider switching to.
On the paper, Guix is superior in many ways but it's not always the feedback I received from people having tried both.\ for a significant time.
Guix is superior in many ways
Like what?
>>2
I already use it, but I thought it's better to start a thread this way to gather new information from people.
>>3
"On paper"
- GNU project with forced freedom of software
- Scheme instead of DSL
>>5
GNU is always like this.
>>3
Another example is their emphasis on reducing the binary seed of a system.
It's cool when it works. Extremely frustrating when it gets in your way, I can't be bothered to learn its god awful configuration language just because I need to use a customized version of some software. Guix is probably not nearly as painful in this regard, since it has sane configuration, but still compared to something as frictionless as Void I'd rather never touch it at all.
Also troublesome if you're not careful is that sometimes, you may end up with software that depends on data, which Nix does not handle, and can have nasty consequences when Nix rebuilds the system without you asking it to when it thinks the data is inconsistent (had a close call with a Nextcloud instance because of this).
Have guix dropped i686 as well? I have an old thinkpad i wanna use again, but NixOS has almost no prebuilt packages for that platform anymore and I really wanna avoid setting up my own binary cache and hydra instance
>>9
By the looks of their download page, it seems they still support i686 as it has the latest release (1.1.0) of Guix.
To be honest I doubt i686 will ever die because of how much FSF relies on old hardware for their "freedoms".
>>9,10
And even if they didn't serve installation images on their homepage, the concept of reducing the binary seed would make it easy to get it running on an older device (thought you'd probably have to compile more yourself).
Yeah that's precisely the problem. NixOS also still supports i686 and it can still compile a lot of stuff (except afaik a lot of i686 specific build problems aren't actively being fixed), but there don't seem to be any prebuild packages for i686 atm.
I have really slow hardware (Pentium M 1,6GHz) and after 48h of compiling I decided that NixOS wasn't gonna work (at least without binary caches).
>>12
If you have a better machine lying around (or a VPS) you could use that for compiling. I'm not sure how to do this with Nix, but Guix has the concept of substitutes:
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Substitutes.html#Substitutes
>>12
I'd suggest using an operating system with a stable release cycle and which is tested on x86. There are many problems introduced by upstream developers for x86 as for the most part developers only test on x86_64. Even using source based distributions over the past few years has become rather difficult at times due to this reason. Guix is rolling release and NixOS is not tested on multiple platforms, so even if you were able to get your system compiled there is a fairly reasonable chance that your system would not work as intended.
To be honest I doubt i686 will ever die because of how much FSF relies on old hardware for their "freedoms".
*our freedoms
Yeah I could setup a binary cache and maybe even Hydra to do that, might if I want it badly enough.
For now tried out Alpine Linux, but I don't really like OpenRC and their design choice of "when in doubt always install / ship less than required for stuff to work" already annoying me a lot.
>>16
When it comes to minimalist distros, void is really nice. runit isn't a mastermind init system, but it's configuration is simple and intuitive. xbps works well and setting up a desktop is not that hard.
when in doubt always install / ship less than required for stuff to work
i run a gentoo from 3-4 years: i feel like it's right on the edge of a lot of projects getting the xpdf treatment (xpdf used to be one simple package, now it's poppler, which in turn pulls the entire freedesktop stack with it), so i obviously have higher tolerance for pain, but what do you mean by above?
really annoying if you do setup-xorg-base and it doesn't install mouse and keyboard drivers. like not even keyboard drivers??
>>19 oh, that sounds like your issue is with "APK"? because OpenRC is just an init daemon