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Comment by jnxx | Hacker News Reader

This is great! The one fly in the ointment, pardon, is that Nix is a bit lax about trusting proprietary and binary-only stuff. It would be great if there were a FLOSS-only core system for NixOS which would be fully transparent.

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Nix/Nixpkgs blocks unfree packages by default, so I presume it would be relatively easy to disable packages with the `unFree` attribute.

I totally believe it is possible, it is perhaps more of a cultural thing.

It's the pragmatic thing. I wouldn't use nixOS if I wasn't able to use it on a 16 core modern desktop. I don't think there's a performant and 100% FLOSS compatible computer that wouldn't make me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon when building stuff for ARM.

Talos has 44 core/176 thread server options which can take 2 TBs of DDR4 that are FSF certified. The board firmware is also open and has reproducible builds.

That is way more expensive than a 16-core desktop, though. Workstations are a class above consumer-grade desktops and that's reflected in the price.

Talos have as low as 8 core desktop options as well this is just an example of how far you can take FLOSS hardware. Not that I consider a 16 core x86 desktop "consumer-grade" in the first place (speaking as a 5950X owner).

Probably not fit for replacing Grandma's budget PC but then again grandma probably isn't worried about the ARM cross compile performance of their machine running NixOS either.

Okay, now I'm interested :)

(I am worried about the ARM cross compile performance of my machine running NixOS)

Thanks, I was legitimately unaware of this option. That does smash my argument, but I'm not likely to be using a system like that anytime soon due to cost concerns mostly.

And it’s not just hardware, there is a useful limit on purity of licenses. In many cases only proprietary programs can do the work at all, or orders of magnitudes better.

> It would be great if there were a FLOSS-only core system for NixOS

Might be wrong but isn't this part of the premise for Guix/GuixSD?

And it's good that it exists, I guess?

But it can't do any of the things I bought my computer to do, so it's of limited value to me.

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