have i bent your ear about guix enough lately?

everyone hates on it but it is my favourite operating system.

the main way i could explain how it makes you feel is ‘lazy’. once you have written your config.scm and done

~ # guix system reconfigure /path-to/config.scm

you just keep repeating that single command to do system upgrades. that’s it. you will never get any weird package dependency hell like in aptitude or, dare i say it, portage.

how do you install programs? it’s all userland after instantiating your config.scm system definition, so:

~$ guix install example-package

there is a similar command flow to aptitude:

~$ guix pull

and

~$ guix upgrade

i will be honest with you, it is very heavy. i regularly do a deep garbage collection and recover hundreds of gigabytes of space. there is a famous dark joke in the community about a ‘top score’ of how much you have garbage collected lately.

i usually just run:

guix gc -d

which deletes everything except the current running generation.

i have heard people talking a lot of smack about the guix documentation, but i honestly don’t agree. it has a pithy kinda GNU cookbook style to it, which is just fine. and, anyway, if you wanna read people’s dotfiles, just read their dotfiles, c’mon.

there was this huge expansion of the project into something called guix home, which i have never needed to use, and i have no understanding of it. that’s the way lisp works baybee uwu.

the incredible thing about guix is that, when installed as an operating system, it replaces a significant amount of traditionally C GNU infrastructure for guile scheme lisp. so yeah, you get a bootloader REPL. the init daemon is a lisp program, ‘shepherd’.

look this shit up, it is such an ambitious and successful project and it really makes me think, y’know?