this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Trying out Guix for the first time! Waiting for packages to download.

I'm a long time Arch user. Any tips?!

I've heard there aren't as many packages for Guix as other distros, but I was thinking Flatpak and distrobox will help bridge the gap for me.

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[–] tasankovasara@sopuli.xyz 3 points 5 days ago (4 children)

I quit on day two with two takeaways:

– Hardware must be well supported in fully-libre-land - I was trying to install on a Mac Mini and had to go nonguix pretty much right away. That kind of spoiled the whole effort.

– Profound meditation and enlightenment on the essence of Scheme is a must. I had one of those 'no, this is where you don't want a closing brace' moments and my zen was blown out of the water.

I would have soldiered on, but personally I like Arch first and foremost because I can (and do) have a local repo by rsyncing a rotation of mirrors couple of times a week. Just in case the Internet dies one day, you know. I realised Guix was not really suitable for the apocalypse use case, so after that brace episode I decided to stick with what my spine already knows.

After all that is said – I really hope you fare better :D

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I've also wanted to try out Guix for a while.. part of the reason I'm leaving a comment is just so I can recheck these posts later :P

But when I do I for sure will start out from nonguix because I'm quite confident that my hardware won't be supported (I even have a recently purchased Wifi 7 card that relies on ath12k module that I'm quite sure won't be in the official Guix repo.. maybe I'd even need to compile it myself..)

I see in the nonguix readme that there's a way to generate an iso that includes already a nonguix kernel, so I'll have a look at that.

It even looks like you can create a writeable image to run from a USB thumbdrive, which looks very interesting, I gotta try that!

guix system image --image-size=7.2GiB /path/to/this/channel/nongnu/system/install.scm
dd if=/path/to/disk-image of=/dev/sdb-or-whichever-drive-is-usb bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

I've been burnt by Arch before which is what has got me into exploring other distros. I might ultimately end up again in Arch like you, who knows, but it looks like the way Guix works is well suited for hosting your own repo too.. I think I've seen before someone hosting their own Guix repo in github, including also a bunch of configuration for their system, which got me curious.

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