Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

  • mrh
    15•1 year ago

    I daily drive GNU Guix instead, and I would strongly recommend any emacs and/or lisp enthusiasts interested in the benefits of functional, reproducible, declarative, and hackable system management to give it a try!

    • NCR Ranger
      4•1 year ago

      Do you run the gnu guix distro or just use the package manager? Because iirc it uses only free software, even for drivers. So I imagine it is not that easy to find compatible hardware.

      • mrh
        4•1 year ago

        I run the complete system. It’s true that the standard iso comes with the linux-libre kernel and the standard channel (think repo) contains only free software. However there is the nonguix channel which comes with the full linux kernel, and all the proprietary drivers you could ask for.

        Nonguix offer an ISO with the full kernel too in case you have a proprietary wifi card and don’t have ethernet for the initial setup. The nonguix README I think is pretty clear, but Systemcrafters also made an excellent guide for doing this.

        My wifi card unfortunately requires proprietary drivers and I have personally never had an issue with guix + nonguix for all my software needs, proprietary and otherwise.

        Hope that helps profligate!

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 year ago

          Does it actually require proprietary drivers or just proprietary firmware? I don’t know of any wifi cards that actually require proprietary drivers on Linux.

          • @rrobin
            1•1 year ago

            I run the GUIX system distribution in all my machines - other than the initial install being a bit harder it is great.

            Firmware blobs yes. The default GUIX kernel patches out all proprietary blobs, but the nonguix kernel has them. I do have one machine where I also build the kernel package with my own config because the the wifi driver is not build by default in the linux kernel.

            Did a quick search here, besides firmware, nonguix has packages for the nonfree nvidia drivers, brother printer driver, unrar.

            In addition nonguix also packages software that GUIX does not, e.g. firefox, or third party binaries:

            https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix/-/tree/master/nongnu/packages

      • mrh
        1•1 year ago

        It’s a source-based distribution like Arch so packages are as up to date as the package maintainers keep them. Of course anybody can go in and submit a newer version of a package if the original packager has been slacking on updating. You can also use your own custom version of the package by just copying the package definition, bumping up the version number, and then installing it with guix package -f my-custom-package.scm