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

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

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.

-- 
Ricardo