Re: Best base system for Guix

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr>]

Alexander,

I don't have personal experience but think it likely that 
Trisquel/Debian is used by more contributors than Arch, which means that 
integration bugs are more likely to be noticed and fixed.  The 
difference shouldn't be significant, and we're always open to bug 
reports from Guix on other GNU/Linux distributions.  Most contributors 
run Guix System.

However:

On 2021-11-11 11:59, Alexander Asteroth wrote:
> I've tried
> arch and debian 11 and noticed that the packages available in Guix 
> under
> arch are way more recent (e.g icecat 91 vs 6x) and more in general.

Something's wrong.  Guix provides a single rolling release across all 
Guix Systems and foreign distributions.

The 'guix' packages for foreign distributions install an older snapshot 
of Guix which sets up the daemon and puts a 'guix' command in the global 
$PATH.

Users are expected to run 'guix pull' (similar to 'pacman -S' but per 
user--never sudo!) to update it.  This will update both guix itself and 
the list of availabe packages.

> Also I'm asking myself how Guix deals with different
> systems/kernels/base installations and how it decides which packages
> will work?

It doesn't.  Either your Arch system isn't properly configured so that 
'command -v guix' returns ~/.config/guix/current/bin/guix, or you 
haven't run 'guix pull' to create or update that copy of guix.

If you have run 'guix pull' and still see outdated packages, let us 
know.  There's something wrong with the system then.

> Isn't there any dependence? Is this documented somewhere?

Once installed, Guix expects little more from the host system than a 
reasonably modern Linux kernel (supporting certain namespaces, syscalls 
& the like) and minimal configuration like a running Guix daemon, the 
guixbuild* users, mounted /dev, etc.  I don't think these are formally 
documented in a single place.

If available, the 'guix' package on a foreign distribution will set that 
up for you: it can depend on foreign packages, set up users/groups, 
support uninstallation, etc., in a cleaner way than the guix-install.sh 
shell script can.

Kind regards,

T G-R

Sent from a Web browser.  Excuse or enjoy my brevity.