Comment by rekado | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rekado | Hacker News Reader

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Disclaimer: I have been working on Guix since 2014 and use it in production.

Guix and Nix are both implementations of the functional package management idea. Nix has been around for quite a few more years than Guix.

In Guix package expressions are first-class and the DSL is embedded in Guile, a general purpose language, so packaging has a very different feel to it. It also allows for fun tools like "guix graph".

Guix is used in scientific environments (e.g. where I work); I don't know if there are deployments of Nix in HPC environments. I do think that there are more bioinformatics tools packaged for Guix.

Another difference is in how the two projects approach certain problems, such as bootstrapping from binaries. (Guix just got a new Java bootstrap from C.)

There is no rivalry between these projects and members of both projects cooperate in the reproducible builds efforts.

Ludovic linked to this a couple weeks ago: https://ubc.uu.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/GNU-Guix-for-ma...

How easy (or even possible) is it to use proprietary libraries such as MKL or CUDA or GPU drivers with Guix/GuixSD?

It's all possible to do, but the Guix developers do not provide assistance. From a purely technical perspective, software provided in binary form only impedes one of the main goals of Guix, 100% reproducible builds, because there is no source code.

But would they provide resistance? As nice as the idea of a fully-free distro is, I have the impression that free distros have a minuscule userbase compared to their non-free counterparts. For an already niche distro, this sounds like a significant handicap.

If someone came along and offered a hardware-compatibility repo or redistribution, would the Guix community work with them, or would the relationship be more distant, or even adversarial?

I'm personally very interested in the project, and have no desire to poison the pure core of Guix, but I need my hardware to work.

We don't want to have discussions about non-free software on the project channels, because they really are off-topic. We won't do anything to sabotage third-party repositories (no matter what they might contain); in fact, we're working on implementing mechanisms to make it easier to load software from third-party channels.

But as a project following the Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) we will not recommend third-party channels providing proprietory software, nor would we want our project's communication channels (mailing list, IRC, etc) to be used to steer users to channels that provide non-free software.

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