I saw Guix as a recommendation for a systemd-free distro and felt compelled to post: The biggest problem with proposing Guix as an alternative for most people—aside from all the parentheses, which are scary, apparently—is that using it as an OS all but requires the knowledge and use of the nonguix resources.

This is kind of like the Nvidia driver problem—people using Windows who decide to switch to free and open platforms are effectively told to go fuck themselves (this is getting better!) because of hardware choices they made in the past and can’t necessarily afford to change now—except applied to far more hardware.

I’ve had problems with various distros and operating systems after installation on my Framework (ugh) but Guix and NetBSD were the only ones I failed to installl at all. (And the latter is because of Framework’s wack-ass ACPI implementation more than anything.) Maybe this got better with the recent release? It’s a shame if not, because Guix, Guile, and Shepherd seem like a really interesting stack, but I ain’t putting this much work into using them when the Linux kernel itself is also a candidate for replacement given its slop policy.

(Also worth noting that I have seen criticism of GNU / FSF at least from one of the head Guile maintainers, which is nice, and my impression is that Guix and Shepherd also maintain the relationship because extricating themselves would be financially and operationally difficult if not impossible. Could be wrong there? Either way I wouldn’t necessarily let criticism of Stallman and other fuckwits get in the way of experimenting with this trio.)

#Guix