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• @juipeltje@lemmy.world 2026-10-20 21:55

  So far it has been perfectly usable once you get the hang of it, but i do need nonguix for the kernel on actual hardware. Guix does have a smaller package repo, but they do have a Nix service that you can use to easily get the Nix package manager up and running and install packages through Nix if you need them. A few months ago there was an issue with the nonguix substitute server that lasted for multiple weeks, so in that time if you wanted to update you had to compile the kernel yourself. I don’t know if this is something that happens more often or if it was an unfortunate incident, but that did suck. Going forward though i’m planning on installing Guix on my server and with something that Guix calls “offloading”, you can configure it so that a stronger machine can build your configuration, so that my poor laptop for example doesn’t have to do the compiling lol. Since Guix is more obscure it can be a bit more difficult to find answers in communities like Reddit, but on the flip side i feel like their documentation is better organized than Nix, and they provide code snippets in there as well to cover a lot of usecases you might have. Another thing to keep in mind is the iso, cause since it’s all libre by default without firmware blobs, unless you have a libre compatible system, you won’t be able to render a graphical environment, and wifi on laptops can be an issue too. For my first install i used this old System Crafters iso and followed his guide to install it. At the moment i’m working on a helper script for myself that pulls in my config and runs some of the lengthy Guix commands i need, that i can then run after i install guix with the official iso, which should work cause even without firmware, you should be able to render a tty and the Guix installer also uses ncurses inside the tty. Hope this wasn’t too lengthy of a reply lol, didn’t realize i was going to be typing this much.

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