this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Guix is really making fantastic progress and is a good alternative in the space between stable and fully FOSS distributions, likes Debian, and distributions which are more up-to-date, like Arch.
And one interesting thing is that the number of packages is now so large that one can frequently install additional more recent packages on a Debian systems, or ones that are not packaged by Debian.
For example, I run Debian stable as base system, Guix as extra package manager (and Arch in a VM for trying out latest software for programming).
The thing is now Guix often provides more recent packages tham Debian, like many Rust command line tools, where Debian is lagging a bit. There are many interesting ones, and most are recent because Rust is progressing so fast. Using Guix, I can install them without using the language package manager, regardless whether iy is written in Rust, Go, or Python 3.13.
Or, today I read an article about improvements in spaced repetition learning algorithms. It mentioned that the FLOSS software Anki provided it, and I became curious and wanted to have a look at Anki. Well, Debian has no "anki" package - and it is written, among other languages, im Python and Rust, so good luck getting it on Debian stable. But for Guix, I only had to do "guix install anki" and had it installed.
This works a tad slower than apt-get ... but it still saves time compared to installing stuff and dependencies manually.