Re: mailing list and Evolution / Email client and: Guix, compared with Trisquel/Guix

Re: mailing list and Evolution / Email client and: Guix, compared with Trisquel/Guix

[Zelphir Kaltstahl]

On 2/13/22 14:23, help-guix-request@gnu.org wrote:
> Gottfried<gottfried@posteo.de>  writes:
>
>> What`s the difference to install GNU Guix as a system or install
>> Trisquel and Guix on top of it? What is the advantage of both
>> possibilities?
> With Guix System you get all the services from Guix System.
>
> You can boot older generations of your system, and there is no “state”
> shared between generations of your system.  Any time you upgrade your
> system (with “guix system reconfigure /path/to/my/config.scm”) Guix
> builds a new, independent system.  Any time you boot you can select the
> latest or a previous generation of your system, and when booting the
> selected system is initialized from scratch (it copies files from
> /gnu/store to /etc, creates user accounts, etc).
>
> What’s great about this Guix System approach in my opinion:
>
> - you have a safety net and can recover from bad upgrades
> - changes to the system are not permanent unless you make them so
> - changes to one system generation don’t affect older system generations
>
> There is still a potential for complication when changing hardware
> (e.g. an old generation expecting a certain disk to appear, but you no
> longer have a disk with that label, so you can’t boot that old
> generation without hassle), but overall it takes the fear out of
> upgrading.
>
>> I installed Guix as my System because if I had installed Trisquel I
>> would have older software. And to add Guix on top of Trisquel seemed
>> to me not so beneficiary and may be leading to inconsistency. To be on
>> the save side I installed Guix as my System in order to run smoothly.
> Good choice!  When you use Guix on top of Trisquel you’re still using a
> lot of software from Trisquel, which has the potential of conflicting
> with your software from Guix — especially with search paths and
> environment variables that invariably end up causing Trisquel to load
> incompatible stuff from Guix or vice versa.

I would say though, that using Guix package manager on foreign distro (like 
Trisquel) is still very helpful. For one you can use guix time machine and guix 
environments to have reproducible environments for your software development 
projects. The other huge benefit I see is access to mostly up-to-date free 
software package, which might be missing in your foreign distro's repositories 
and the ability to install them and remove them cleanly.

I don't see how Trisquel would invariably load incompatible stuff. All you do is 
put the guix profile on the path and from the guix profile there are symlinks to 
the gnu store. Whatever you install in the guix profile will then be on the 
path, but that is just normal, I guess. I don't see any issue that I would not 
have with a different tool installing software. I also haven't seen incompatible 
stuff yet. Might be just me installing usually well known software, that has 
been tested more thoroughly and not having run into the edge cases yet.

Personally I use guix on foreign distro every day and I am glad to have it and 
not having to do the full jump to guix distro. Surely that would be interesting, 
but job requirements make that difficult and I cannot spend time on debugging my 
system on the job. Maybe guix distro is easier to handle than I think. One day I 
will probably try it out : )

Regards,
Zelphir

-- 
repositories:https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl

Re: mailing list and Evolution / Email client and: Guix, compared with Trisquel/Guix

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> writes:

> I don't see how Trisquel would invariably load incompatible stuff. All
> you do is put the guix profile on the path and from the guix profile
> there are symlinks to the gnu store. Whatever you install in the guix
> profile will then be on the path, but that is just normal, I guess. I
> don't see any issue that I would not have with a different tool
> installing software. I also haven't seen incompatible stuff yet. Might
> be just me installing usually well known software, that has been
> tested more thoroughly and not having run into the edge cases yet.

I’ve seen a lot of users run into problems like that.  The usual suspect
is one of the XDG_* variables.  There may also be problems with caches
that are loaded by programs from Guix *and* the system, and with
standard locations that can affect the behavior of applications.  One
problem manifests itself as a crash when displaying a file dialog, for
example.

These are not unavoidable, but it’s certainly surprising and annoying
when it happens.

Of course, Guix is still a very helpful tool, no matter what distro you
happen to use underneath.

-- 
Ricardo