I’ve had an amazing time with it so far. It’s so easy to package for (I haven’t contributed a package upstream, but I’m working on it). There’s like two places you put your configs (/etc/config.scm and .config/guix) and it all just works. Like, I’m not even an emacs user, I don’t really use Lisp much, but it’s just such a pleasure to work with. I haven’t really had any issues with firmware or anything proprietary (old thinkpads ftw), but nonguix and flatpak exist to fix that.
Really the only issue I have is that some software is behind by a version or two, and some things I use haven’t been put in the channel yet (but it seems everything I use regularly is either a patch being worked on or already working).
It took a little bit for it all to click, but after finding the cookbook and looking through others configs, it made a lot of sense.
All that said, I’m a bit too committed to Arch to switch my main machine. Hopefully soon though.
And Guix is completely free and FSDG compliant, which is wonderful.
Is there an easy way to get non-free software in it? Also have you considered or tried NixOS?
Yeah, you can install non-free software, if you really want. I mentioned it in the post, but you can use nonguix or guixrus. They are separate channels, and you just copy like 5 lines into your config (or maybe another few, if you want substitutes). I’ve tried NixOS as well, but I find scheme to be more pleasant than Nix’s DSL (even though I like Haskell). Also, the Guix home-manager equivalent is built-in. It was just a few small things like that, that made me find Guix to be more pleasant overall.
Thanks. I was considering trying Guix/NixOS next time I have to install loonix somewhere. NixOS gets a lot more exposure I feel. There are always people posting about it on hacker news and lobste.rs. But there are a couple things I found weird about it.
NixOS is the older project, that’s probably why it gets noticed more.
NixOS has much more packages, and they are more up to date. Honestly, it is a shame because there are many things about Guix I prefer (especially its license). Also, if you are a developer, it is really nice getting to use nix flakes to set up your development environments.