Why Geeks Don’t Use Guix

• New tab-bar setup
• Next week: Vertico extensions

Yesterday I published a video titled “5 Reasons to Try Guix in 2022” to try and encourage people to give Guix a try this year since there’s a lot of cool new things happening there.

I asked viewers a couple of questions:

• What has kept you from using Guix before?
• If you’ve tried Guix, what problems did you have?

Let’s look at a compilation of some of the recurring themes in the answers I received and talk about what they mean and how they can be addressed!

• I agree!
• More people need to share their experience and understanding

• Booting it is the first problem, but knowing how to configure it is the real problem
• Need to create better learning resources to teach how to write Guix system configuration

• The manual can be a little overwhelming
• There need to be more conceptual / usage documentation
• There is the Guix Cookbook
• A resource that tells you how to do common things in Guix like in other Linux distros

• I don’t really agree, it’s better to know how to write the configuration
• It’s hard to write Scheme if you don’t have good tools!
• Is it possible to write a very user-friendly Lisp editor that is single-purpose for writing Guix config

• Guix doesn’t have as much software packaged as other distributions
• But that’s where YOU come in!
• You can software from other places: other Guix channels, Nix, Flatpak
• We will cover how to write and contribute Guix packages on the channel this year!

• Sometimes there’s software like suckless tools where you need to apply patches or add compiler flags
• One approach: write a package that inherits from the original package and changes only the different parts
• You can load your own customized packages from your own Guix channel or even your dotfiles repository, you just have to set the load path correctly

• It is possible, just not with GRUB (use your system’s EFI bootloader)
• You can set up Guix on WSL2: https://github.com/SystemCrafters/wiki-site/blob/main/content/guix/wsl.org
• Alexandru says its possible to write the bootloader config yourself to boot Windows

• This is even harder when you need to set up services, etc
• But the same solution applies, learn how to do it and contribute it yourself!

• This is definitely a problem, and it’s why I made my installation video and the special installer image
• Guix follows the Free System Distribution Guidelines
• Nonguix channel has the full Linux kernel and other hardware drivers (check out their new substitute server)

• The Nonguix repo has AMD and NVIDIA driver packages, but YMMV

• Is it that the parentheses are just really confusing to look at?
• Sometimes the problem with Lisps is that you don’t really know how to accomplish specific tasks
• We’ll have a Guile Crash Course for Guix Users on the channel soonish

• I think this is the basic barrier to entry for Guix
• You should try to learn Scheme anyway, it’s fun!

• Yes, that’s sort of true, but it’s not a reason to not use Guix

• Install Guix as a secondary package manager and try to use it for different things

• You can use other package channels! Nonguix is a great one, and there are other new ones being create all the time (like guixrus)

• I disagree :)
• Lisp is designed for creating “domain specific languages”, just like Guix’ own configuration syntax!
• Look at Emacs as an example for why this wrong :)

• This is just a plain misunderstanding
• There are new package managers all the time. What about all the AUR package managers for Arch? There’s a new every 20 days!

• There’s plenty new, you’re just not looking at it right

• Guix IRC, mailing lists, System Crafters community, there are plenty of places and people!

• Go to the Guix IRC, the maintainers are there answering questions all day

• That layer is the whole point of Guix and where all the value is derived!