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 !

  • @[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