@xj9 @thezacattacks Aesthetically, #guix wins every time. And in some practical terms too. On #nix I go out of my way to avoid interpreting the whole package tree, on guix it is compiled and I just address packages by name, not by exact property. Guix also has sophisticated ways to express system configuration and relationships between services, that I believe Nix lacks.
I have to admit though, #guix pull is super slow because it compiles the whole package tree. The upgrade to Guile 2.2 is awesome in terms of runtime performance, but it didn't exactly help compilation times.
Guix is also constantly evolving its packaging interface, which means you have to stay up-to-date on the upgrade treadmill. I praised it the other week[0] that they had improved this a bit, but the solution suggested didn't actually work -- I had to[1] go and get the 0.13.0 binaries to go forward.
In terms of Worse is Better, Guix is MIT, Nix is Berkeley. In the long term, Guix is more principled, but in the here and now, Nix gets things done.
[0] https://social.heldscal.la/notice/3435628 [1] Well, chose to, rather than try to track down exactly which revision I would have to pull to get ahead. Maybe it would have been so easy as to pull just the revision one later.
@garbados First time I heard about the blink tag. just had a quick dive into the wikipedia article and it sounds really funny. :D I wished it was about visual design, but it will just be about a statically generated website which is delivered in a distributed way by #IPFS and is defined in #Nix .
@louis As far as I'm concerned #stow was perfected 21 years ago. I don't care if people call it a symlink farm manager or a package manager, it manages my packages equally well either way.
Manually doing cp and mv is one way of managing your packages. A package manager automates it for you. When it comes to merging and unmerging coherent trees of files, #stow is the smallest thing that could possibly work. I refer to it lovingly every time I talk about #guix, so that we don't forget where we came from, and my home directory is a mix of #stow, #nix and #guix.
@louis @clackemovedtoheldscalla GNU #stow is the platonic ideal of system administration. #nix and #guix are its complex but oh so convenient bigger brothers.
@limbclock One step at a time, easy does it. I think switching from Windows to a rather familiar traditional Linux setup is enough of a challenge. A functional package management system, even though #nix has been around since 2004, is still a pretty unconventional idea, and at this point mostly marketable to people who are really into computing.
Yes, I am saying that people who voluntarily run Windows are not really into computing.
I've contributed one patch to the #Guix package tree and I've met and talked to Chris Webber, who contributes more to the Guix and Guile communities.
I just really want both #Nix and Guix to succeed, because they uniquely solve both essential problems and problems of convenience, and if I can't find the time to contribute to the code, at least I'll contribute in evangelism.
I think the problems of 1) service administration usability ( #userops ) 2) reproducibility and 3) polyglot package building, testing and development can only be properly solved by these systems, or something like them that doesn't yet exist.
@limbclock I could say "just a package manager", but #nix (along with its younger sibling #guix) is pretty different from any other package manager. It works on Linux (alongside your existing OS and package manager), FreeBSD and OSX.
@jookia @clacke thank you guys for the tipps. Sounds like I'll try #nix first.. More robust and more packages sounds compelling even though I have to cope with a less capable CLI.