mrh @ mrh @mander.xyz

Posts

17

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54

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yep! I used it as a daily driver for ~a year, switched off to try something new, and have recently switched back indefinitely.

Only distro I’ve ever switched back to after leaving, and that’s because it’s where I plan to stay. It really lives in such a sweet spot of up to date, stable, and simple/hackable.

With a nice handbook, friendly community, runit, xbps-src, and multi lib/arch support, Void is truly great.

guix pull && guix upgrade is still a bit slow, but I never thought excessively slow (definitely slower than xbps, pacman, and probably apt too).

I guess I never thought much about it because of rollbacks, so it’s safe enough to just cron.

Yeah Void is fantastic. I just switched back and I doubt I’ll be moving to anything else.

I only switched away in the first place because I had gotten so comfortable I wanted to try something new (Guix, also amazing!).

But there’s something so comfy about Void once you grok it, just lots of little good decisions which add up to a great experience.

GNU Shepherd! Written and configurable entirely in Guile Scheme, just like Guix itself.

I've never used Arch or Nix, but I switched from Void -> Guix and have been very happy with it. It's such a huge peace of mind to be able to have your whole system declaratively configured, package changes being atomic and generational (rollbacks so no worries about breakage), Guix shell for messing about, and being able to make your system do anything you can write in Scheme.

That's my daily driver. On servers so far I've gone with Debian Stable + Guix.

Also Void is still a fantastic distro, and is what I would use if not for Guix/Nix.

lol glad to see you here on lemmy too, keep up the good and enthusiastic work :)

Guix is a source based (rolling release) distro. Any package operation you do like like installing, updating, or removing, can be rolled back. So if an update ever breaks anything you can just roll-back and wait for the fix. You can even pin that specific package and continue to upgrade the rest of your system. And every state is saved in a generation, so you can go to any state your system has ever been in package/configuration wise.

Nix has all of these advantages as well.

GNU Guix

Comeau

I have never used nix or nixos. I liked their shared idea (functional, atomic, reproducible systems), and so when I looked at their differences they seemed to all be pros for guix:

1. Clearer, more robust, more centralized documentation
2. GNU Project
3. Guile Scheme (Lisp) as opposed to Nix DSL
4. Unparalleled emacs integration

The only bittersweet aspect of guix compared to nix was the foss only stuff, as I do need some proprietary drivers, but nonguix is so easy it hasn't been a practical issue. And of course I am big advocate of free software so I like that guix is pushing that forward.

There's also a theoretical issue that guix has less packages, but the standard channel + nonguix has had everyhing I use.

Alternatively if price is an issue (NEVER use a “free” VPN) you could torrent over I2P, which is free and very safe (at least as safe as tor, if not moreso).

Also the next release of qbittorrent is about to have built in I2P support (but also standard I2P comes with its own torrenting software).

I quite enjoy it!

Being able to rollback any change I make to the system, either package changes or system configuration, makes it completely unbreakable and provides great peace of mind. It means I can fully enjoy its rolling-release nature without worrying.

Having my entire system configuration declared in a single, robust programming language (Guile) across a small number of files makes it very easy to understand and just stick into source control to reproduce.

Being able to hack on it in a lisp (scheme) is the cherry on top, along with the great emacs integration. I would highly recommend it to any lisp/emacs/gnu enthusiasts.

Thanks for pointing that out! The more math in the federation the better I say.

Thanks for the plug! I'm honestly pretty surprised that neither the math community on lemmy.world nor lemmy.ml has had much activity since r/math has been and still is private. Where are all the reddit math lovers getting their fix? I know I miss mine.