Re: guix pull; guix package -u; sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm

[raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net>]

On Sun, 10 Apr 2022 10:01:59 +0000
Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> wrote:

>   Do I have to do a "sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm"
>   always after the "guix package -u"?
>   Can I do it every month or every second month? when I don't need the
>   latest version of packages?
> 
>   Gottfried
> 
> 
> > I solve the latter by having a very lean system profile, only the
> > bare essentials are installed for the whole system, things like the
> > window manager are only in my user profile. raingloom@riseup.net  
> 
> How did you do that? to create a "very lean system profile"?
> I am not a hacker but a normal Linux user right now.
> 
> Gottfried
> 
> 

Don't add big packages like gnome to the operating-system's packages
field. If you based your system on the desktop template, then it's
probably a part of it.
That's pretty much it, really. GNOME was the biggest problem for me.
Sometimes GDM would cause issues too, so I got rid of that as well.
This might be overkill for your use case.

I can't really write a proper tutorial right now, so here are some
starting points:
* the `filter` function in Guile Scheme
* combine with service-kind to remove services you don't need
* the %desktop-services definition in the Guix source code, or just
  eval it from a Guile REPL and see what's in it

In general, don't put anything in the `packages` field, unless you need
it for system rescue and administration. So, putting rsync there is
fine, you might need it for restoring from a backup. But GNOME is not
fine, it has a lot of dependencies that you probably won't even use and
any one of them could slow down or break your system build.

Caveat emptor: it might not be possible to use GNOME with a display
manager (like GDM, it's the graphical thingy you log in with) unless
it's installed in your system profile. You might have to launch it
manually with something like `dbus-run-session gnome`, this is also how
you would launch Sway.