I feel like IRC is yet another obstacle to newcomers, in addition to email based git flow, debbugs, guile stack traces and zero editor (or very early WIP) integration except for Emacs. This is literally vendor lock-in. I’ve been contributing for years and now i almost have no trouble, but it was painful and I don’t think it is fair to expect everyone to go through all this while with Nix you just need to open a PR.

What is the point of building a completely free system, that does not try to extract value from users, and actually tries to emancipate them by offering a trusted computing ecosystem, if no one gets to enjoy it because you made it so inaccessible that people are not able to use it? I’m exaggerating but I think you get the point. Now with efforts like the survey it looks like a fresh breath of air just entered the project, and the situation with contributions is a little better than a couple of years ago. I really hope we can pull an effort to make the bar for using and contributing Guix a little lower than it currently is, I am convinced that if we make some effort more people could liberate their computing environment with Guix

I feel kind of bad about this but I refuse to join Guix IRC. I use mailing list out of frustration but these communication channels are the proof that Guix is not only a nice, useful and open project but it has born a project for fossbro babyboomers. It is a golden walled garden for themselves , I don’t feel ok in that space.

EDIT: I’ve answered a little emotionally. Let me clarify, I believe most Guix maintainers act of of good will and they want to find some communication platform which is inclusive for everyone (since it is clear also to rocks that IRC is good only for someone born before 1990, so it is good for people aged >= 35) . Some of the maintainers, and some most noisy members of the community make it so bad for everyone else but themselves that, having so much explicit and soft power, the discussion about moving away from communication protocols older than CDs was closed stating “everything is perfect as it is, we reach exactly the right set of people, we do not care of increasing the userbase or making the community more inclusive”.

Maybe the point is that you cannot demand that the whole world knows the same set of concepts as you do. Otherwise just learn to remove cancer by yourself instead of forcing a person that studied decades to get down their trone and do their job

A little too pitchy imho. It is just a regular linux distro with each system update creating a new fs snapshots .

Just use Nix/Guix lmao

I wouldn’t go the manual way if you are not forced. If you use NetworkManager you can import the configuration either grafically or with nmcli.

It should be sufficiente to modify the network manager service provided by Guix:

(modify-services %desktop-services
 [...]
 (network-manager-service-type config =>
 		               (network-manager-configuration
			        (inherit config)
			        (vpn-plugins (list network-manager-openvpn))))

reconfiguring your system, rebooting and then importing the configuration and set your credentials

It is quite basic still and historically had some problems with reboots, but lately it has gained a lot of attention and bug fixes. I have no experience of runnit, compared to systemd is leaner but in my experience there’s no big feature lacking

They do very different things even if the outcome is the same. You are not rollingback your system by downgrading each package. You are statefully changing your filesystem. Rollbacks in Nix and Guix are internet free, atomic and reproducible because they amount to changing the target of a single symlink

I guess you are not entitled free support once you execute a free program

I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .

The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that’s very intense, let’s say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials

with nonguix the lines are like five instead of one, but yes there are less packages than nix. the real selling point imho is how everything is human-sized and consistent

imho having a more accessible contribution workflow would increase the number of people interested in spending time in reviewing.

Regardless of the many problems of web forges today the ability to review only what’s changed between the various revisions of a pull request and the comments in a single view is not achievable with a simple email workflow. You end up reimplementing the PR/MR functionality with other tools, exactly as is happening with the Guix QA tools. I love them but we’re reimplementing gitlab/gitea/codeberg by parsing patch revisions from emails subjects.

it’s not like it’s easy contributing to guix :( i really hope they move to something more accessible

If you don’t have commit access you don’t need an account. I contributed many times without ever registering on Savannah.

Do you have commit access? Otherwise your account is mostly useless also if they don’t delete it.

Yes and if you like lisp or FSDG compliance have a look at Guix

The fact that you see guix downloading mariadb is probably due to “inputs bloat” you may never be able to get rid of it without an upstream fix or providing your own implementation of some upstream package/service. 4 to 6 hours is a lot, do you use substitutes?

If you want to reduce the bloatedness of your operating-system record, look into %desktop-services or %base-services (depending on which one you are overriding) and delete/replace what you will with modify-services.

Here are my configurations.

not sure if it’s still useful, I sometimes use this script to find out which executable file depend on which shared library in a fs tree. maybe it can help you too

Hi, I just wanted to share small collection of utilities I’m maintaining to ease my way into Guix development. I hope they can help you as they do for me :)

Working Screensharing from first boot lmao

Just use lisp