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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

I have been using GuixSD on my Thinkpad X220 for about 2 years now and it is has been good overall. I have fairly simple needs: GNOME 3, Emacs, Firefox (called IceCat in GuixSD). The full system rollback feature has been very handy at times when I do something terrible to my OS configuration file and just want to move on to other things.

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I I may (I hope I'm not coming across as rude, I'm genuinely interested in running GuixSD):

How 'recent' are the packages?

I care for little things, but say.. libvirt or Firefox would be something I'd like to keep quite up to date. Is it possible to run Firefox (not Iceweasel)?

Do you use any 'unfree' packages and how much hassle is it to acquire those?

Packages are kept very up-to-date in general. The contributors try their best to keep up with the latest stable releases, so freshness resembles a distro like Arch more than Debian. I don't use any nonfree packages and Guix provides none because it conforms to the GNU FSDG, so there is no Firefox package available. Someone could provide a nonfree package collection that users could install separately but I don't know of any. The IceCat project is based on the extended support releases of Firefox and Guix provides updates quickly. I hope that someday Firefox will become FSDG compliant so there's no longer a need for IceCat.

> Someone could provide a nonfree package collection that users could install separately but I don't know of any.

This is the main think holding me back from switching to GuixSD (from NixOS). While I do like the prospect of running a 100% free OS, I'm not 100% sure I can with my current hardware. If I install GuixSD, and find out that I need a non-free driver or kernel, the responsibility of getting that falls on my completely inexperienced lap. I would be much more inclined to run a partially non-free system to get used to GuixSD, then start cutting out the non-free parts.

> How 'recent' are the packages?

It's the only place I know of where you can currently get GCC 7.1. [0]

> Is it possible to run Firefox (not Iceweasel)?

If you spun up your own package, and didn't distribute, probably. The IceCat package is 746 lines of Scheme at the moment, so porting it might not be complete hell. [1]

That being said, the current IceCat is based on Firefox 52, so that's a fairly close version-parity, even if you miss out on the nonfree aspects of FF.

> libvirt

Guix currently has libvirt 3.2.0, whereas the very latest is 3.3.0. A fairly close parity, and I'd expect an update to the Guix package soon-ish.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/g.html

[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages...

Most of the "core" packages are very recent. Guix typically has zero-day updates for popular software such as git, kernel, ffmpeg etc, and obviously most of the GNU portfolio.

The only "unfree" package I use is the vanilla Linux kernel (for non-free wifi firmware), which is fairly easy to tie into the system configuration.

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