A First Look at Guix Home

• Emacs 28 release branch has been created! Start testing it out now to help find bugs before release: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-09/msg02290.html

guix home allows you to apply configurations to your user account with all the same benefits that you get from guix system:

• Install packages
• Place files in the filesystem (dotfiles?)
• Configure your programs with Scheme (!)
• Run user-level services
• Roll back to previous configurations (!)

One really nice benefit is that it can be used on “foreign” distributions, try it out without fully switching to Guix System!

This could easily replace some of the configuration work I do with Org Babel, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Check out the Home Configuration page in the Guix manual for more information.

• Andrew Tropin’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TROP1N/
• Andrew’s rde channel/repo: https://github.com/abcdw/rde
• Andrew’s rde mailing lists: https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw
• rde home config example: https://github.com/abcdw/rde/blob/master/rde/examples/abcdw/configs.scm
• yoctocel’s home config: https://hg.sr.ht/~yoctocell/guixrc/browse/yoctocell/home
• krevedkokun’s home config: https://git.sr.ht/~krevedkokun/dotfiles/tree/master/item/home/yggdrasil

I have not tried to use guix home yet, so we’re going to try it out for the first time together today.

I’ll try to see how far we can get with building a home configuration in a test environment, including cloning my dotfiles repo and applying some of the files from it.

Some questions:

• What happens when .profile already exists?
• Can manifest files be kept separately and loaded into the home config?
• Can we put system and home configurations into the same file? (I think yes)
• Is there a way to pin user-level channel configuration easily?
• How nicely will this play with Org Babel configs or anything else that will be hand-edited outside of the scope of guix home (like an Emacs config)?