This is repeated often but it is an unfortunate misunderstanding. One self-contained component of Nix was used unaltered in Guix: the nix-daemon. Everything else but the daemon (and that's a lot) is a completely independent implementation of the same principles that were first demonstrated in Nix: functional package management.
Why reuse the daemon? Because it could be done. The daemon takes very low level build instructions ("derivations") and arranges for them to be executed in an isolated environment. In Guix derivations are generated through compilation of higher level concepts that as such have no correspondence in Nix.
The common ground is the format of the derivation, which has only been modified occasionally to better suit our differing needs.
That currently isn't possible, but would be nice.
I imagine it could only work for packages, not for system configuration. But that still would be a huge win.
This is desirable as there are minor annoying differences between the build environment spawned by the C++ daemon and the environment one would get using "guix environment --container". Unifying this by simply using Guile on both sides of the divide (build side vs host side) would allow for more code reuse within Guix and unlock a few features.
It's not a high priority because the modified nix-daemon works fine for now, but a CS student is moving forward with the Guile daemon as a university project now.
So the dream of sharing the same daemon may not be realistic. I think that this is not a big deal, because the daemon really should serve the project and as the needs of the two projects diverge so do their respective daemons.
You're likely right though that compatibility between the two projects will continue diverge. My true dream was that vendors wouldn't have to build for Snap, Flatpak, Guix, and Nix. They could just use either Guix or Nix and have something usable by either user base. In the end the outputs are just writing stuff to the store.
But the fact that the store paths are already different would make it a huge migration for that path to change in the future, and unlikely to ever happen. Still, I can dream.
I watched a video of a seasoned linux user trying to install nix and abandoning the procedure because of the lack of docs. I even downloaded a virtualbox image of NixOS and tried to update everything to the latest version: 30 minutes later only firefox was installed but it wasn't in PATH thus couldn't be executed. Never found out how to install the KDE desktop.
Guix was another beast that I tried installing as a non-root user (insisted on using `curl | bash`, which I loathe). It was never up to date and I couldn't find the package I wanted to install (so fancy new chromium wrapper.. next-browser or something).
Maybe now things are better, but back then (1-2 years ago), neither were anywhere close to modern GUI distros. Until they make it easy to use, it's going to stay niche.
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/guix.html#Binary-Instal...
I think you'll find that things are much more up to date nowadays. You still need root access for the guix-daemon though.
To learn more about Nix, I'd recommend grepping the nixpkgs [3] repository once you grasp the basics of the Nix language (Nix Pills [4] would be a good start for that). Since everything in the Nix official repository belongs in nixpkgs, it's easy to search for the information I want. I just wish CentOS and Debian had a way of searching across the entire codebase this easily when I couldn't figure out something from the docs.
[1]: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-x11 [2]: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#idm140737322634320 [3]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs [4]: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/
You can use https://sources.debian.org/ website to search in the Debian packages and their source code.
Another pain point is looking for documentation of Nix library functions, I've solved this by using Manix[0]
This video helped me a lot though, but unfortunately there are a few minutes of broken audio in the middle https://youtu.be/2mG0zM_wtYs
To anyone that wanders by this, if you value your time at all, don't bother with nix unless you have someone you can corner and directly get answers from.
Provably false. The last commit was Oct 9, not "eight months ago," and numerous PRs were merged since then:
https://github.com/NixOS/nix-pills/commits/master
https://github.com/NixOS/nix-pills/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclos...
> don't bother with nix unless you have someone you can corner and directly get answers from.
Just because your single PR slipped through the maintainers attention? Wow, you must have to avoid a lot of high profile open source projects.
Furthermore, the official page very clearly states how you could reach the community for help, although I highly recommend you to lower your tone before doing so:
To enable KDE, you put this into your configuration.nix:
services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.enable = true;
I've been using NixOS since 2017 and don't ever want to look back. I agree that NixOS is not anywhere close to modern GUI distros, but do like the documentation, and the friendliness and speed of the community.
The manual also includes a Getting Started section, so you don't need to read all 500+ pages to figure out how to use it.
With nix every package is siloed into its own separate dependency graph and so you can have many versions of a shared library coexisting on the system but each version may be used only by one consumer. That means upgrading one will not affect all the others.
So then the only way to get consumers of a shared library to upgrade is to upgrade the consumers as well. Well then why not switch to static linking and be done with it? It would be much simpler that way.
Packages as defined in nixpkgs don't depend on specific versions of shared libraries. They depend on the library by name, just as they do in any other OS. So a single update in nixpkgs addresses all packages on the system "for free", including ones defined outside of nixpkgs, because they're almost certainly going to depend on nixpkgs for those libraries (I mean, they could duplicate the definitions, but why would they?).
Built packages depend on specific versions. So you just have to be sure to update all your built packages. How does that happen? Well, packages are installed because they're requested by name somewhere, either NixOS system packages, or from home-manager, or from a dev environment. Those names point to packages in nixpkgs. So when you update your nixpkgs version (using nix-channel or flake update or however you're doing it), and then rebuild NixOS or update home-manager, you get updated versions of everything.
If you're using a nix-based dev environment with pinned nixpkgs (with niv or a flake or whatever), you'll have to update that pin as well, for each project. I suppose you could claim that this makes it easy to use old dependencies. Perhaps, but the entire point of pinning the nixpkgs version is to make everything 100% reproducible, bugs and all, all the way down your dependency stack. So you have to make a deliberate choice between trade-offs there, which seems fair.
As far as static linking, nix is essentially static linking, except that you still get the benefits of shared disk space and shared memory for .so files. "True" static linking might be simpler if your dependencies happen to be .so files that also have .a files, but many things aren't, e.g. dependencies among python modules, depending on other binaries to exec, data files, etc. Nix lets you "statically link" all of those too.
Automatically translated.
$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.ungoogled-chromium
$ which chromium
/home/sergeykish/.nix-profile/bin/chromium
guix install ungoogled-chromium
For example, the Nix language doesn't have the ability to define new data types, and it doesn't have a "package" or an "operating system" data type. That means that all the entries in Nixpkgs look alike, which in turn prevents building a "package-aware" or "OS-aware" user interface.
The Guix CLI "knows" about packages and versions, and package transformation options are an example of how the CLI can take advantage of that abstraction.
Likewise, the "guix system" command knows about services, which gives it convenient introspection capabilities such as "guix system extension-graph" and "guix system shepherd-graph".
It really isn't about parentheses vs. braces. :-)
Guix on the other hand provides those, but is far from what nixpkgs offers in terms of number and actuality of pkgs.
Nixpkgs has the biggest package repository of all the distributions, and a much larger community.
If you compare Guix against Arch for example, Guix comes out more favorably (15k packages) vs Arch's 12k.
Guix packages tend to be very well integrated too, usually running upstream test suites, leading to fewer run-time problems. I think only Debian and Fedora matches Guix on this practice.
* Do packages need to be 'ported' to Nix or its build / install system? If so, how much effort will it take and on what factors the effort required to port may vary substantially? (eg: Programming Language).
* How is disk space usage? Is there any kind of deduplication?
* How are security updates to shared libraries handled?
* Transactional upgrades look great. But how is the user experience around Transactional upgrades of running GUI applications?
* Other performance characteristics - bandwidth (delta upgrades possible?), startup time (I hope this will be good)..
It's deprecation addressed so you only store any given dependency & version once, but if you need multiple versions you store each.
It's easy for the storage size to balloon, but also easy to garage collect away stuff you aren't using without worrying about it
You update the library and every thing it depends on
You need to restart the gui application after the upgrade
The download size can be big, I haven't found it much more inconvenient than other distros
Start up time is unremarkable
As for disk size, beyond garbage collection, you can also ask Nix to sweep its store and hardlink identical files together in order to save space if you suspect significant file duplication (and if your FS doesn't already deduplicate blocks).
> * Do packages need to be 'ported' to Nix or its build / install system? If so, how much effort will it take and on what factors the effort required to port may vary substantially? (eg: Programming Language).
Yes. To make Nix really work it has to be pervasive and this sometimes means porting packages again, however there's a lot of automation around this, see[0] for ones that leverage existing build systems in other languages. Autoconf and cmake packages are already accounted for by the default builder, and usually only the dependencies have to be specified.
> * How is disk space usage? Is there any kind of deduplication?
The Nix store can be intensive on memory, as once a dependency such as glibc is updated, all the reverse dependencies (i.e. the set X such that X depends on glibc directly or transitively) have to be rebuilt as well. There is an option to optimise the store, but I don't know how much it helps in practice, see[1]. Garbage collection can be invoked manually or automatically to free up unused store entries.
> * Other performance characteristics - bandwidth (delta upgrades possible?), startup time (I hope this will be good)..
By startup time you might be referring to NixOS. It's very good on my Late 2013 13-inch MacBook Pro, around 20 seconds to go from cold boot to login screen.
[0] https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix https://github.com/NixOS/cabal2nix https://github.com/cargo2nix/cargo2nix https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix https://github.com/kamilchm/go2nix https://github.com/nix-community/pip2nix
I was referring to application startup which is an issue for snap & flatpak. I'd like to know how it (Nix + sandboxing solution like bubblewrap) compares to flatpak.
So While I don’t have benchmarks, it is basically in the same ballpark as Arch programs.
Uh... what? You're comparing these things against Guix and Nix, which require you to learn a new language to use. Not to mention that AppImage, at least, is only complex because it kinda has to be in order to be portable, single-file, directly-executable application. Which is to say, it is only complex in its implementation so that it can be much less painful to interact with [0].
> Nix on the other hand solves the problem extremely well. You can have different complex applications running side by side with very different dependencies trees and they will not cross paths.
Which AppImage can do without you having to learn a new language, and as a bonus will even let you store those applications on entirely different media without recompilation or anything.
> Similarly, Nix is easily installed on any existing system.
AppImages work on most Linux systems, which is about as well as anyone can do with something that requires no pre-installed runtime.
[0] and it actually isn't that complex really.
Not true.
`guix install foo`, done.
Oh, you want to define an operating system declaratively in a file? Yeah, learn the DSL that was designed to let you do just that.
The OS thing is mostly a side effect.
From an end-user perspective, the main difference from other package managers is that you don't need root privileges (and that each user have their own "collections" of packages).
others = industry and leverage existing subsystems
that's why
All the other technologies I mentioned require fairly recent kernels to work, namely for all the namespace shenanigans they employ. Nix can run on perfectly fine on at least Linux 3.2 (stock wheezy), so far as I tested.
Nix feels pretty close to "right thing to do", but if the other solutions are more successful, it's a case of "worse is better".
I think the important part is usability compared to what's already there. It's much easier to write a Dockerfile than to write something with Nix. You can get much stronger benefits from Nix than from a Dockerfile.. but, most of which you don't really need all the time.
My impression is the other solutions are quick-ish hacks to solve problems that come from (and building upon) the complexities of systems built using quick-ish hacks. Nix feels like a more elegant solution, but it's also different enough that it's got a steep learning curve for anything harder than "install foo".
As a bonus, the resulting Docker image is bit-reproducible and recipients of the image can "map it back" to the original Guix revision.
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack....
That's cool. And I can imagine cases where it's useful.
Stuff like Nixery isn't itself enough to claim "nix is better than Docker", though. -- The questions I'd want to think about are "what happens when I run into a problem? how hard is it to fix this?". I feel like Nix does solve some problems that I've had with Dockerfiles. But there are also problems I've run into with Nix that I wouldn't've had with Nix.
I like nix well enough. But I've also used it enough that I'm not surprised if people have difficulties with it, and are more comfortable with other solutions.
You can 'guix pack -RR ibus qutebrowser', copy the resulting binaries to any GNU/Linux system, and still expect them to work.
Guix (unlike Nix) supports "grafts", so you can change something deep in the graph without having to compile every dependent package again. But grafts also produce different store items of course, so no big difference for "guix pack".
In a tightly controlled environment inside a company where the update mechanisms are preconfigured / enforced, I'd go with nix model. When distributing an app to people on the internet, I'd choose flatpak model.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/build-supp...
In Guix grafts are used rather extensively, mainly for security updates, but also command-line transformations such as "--with-debug-info".
More importantly, it's not enough to implement grafts because it's not recursive, as discussed at https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2016/timely-delivery-of-securit... .
Snap, Flatpak, Docker, AppImage, etc are all very complex solutions that are actually quite painful to interact with. Nix on the other hand solves the problem extremely well. You can have different complex applications running side by side with very different dependencies trees and they will not cross paths.
Every time I see a package being distributed as a Snap, I wonder why. These containered solutions are very complex, trying very hard to emulate FHS with mount namespaces, binding mounting tons of sockets around, and almost always end up mounting all of /home in the container. The don't provide much security, and quite difficult to deal with, and require a daemon.
Nix on the other hand has zero containerization requirements. It simply works by ensuring the programs are looking in the right place for the libraries they need. It would be great if more vendors just shipped a Nix derivation (or store path) that was their application stack. It would end version incompatibilities for ever, in a way that isn't a burden for the user.
Nix + bubblewrap add all the benefits of snap and flatpak as well. But again, there is no benefit to bubblewrap is if you are just going to blanket allow read-write everywhere anyway. At least with raw bubblewrap you can make these policies actually protect something.
Similarly, Nix is easily installed on any existing system. So you can use nix packages on Debian, Ubuntu, Centos, Fedora, DSL, or any other linux distribution because it runs entirely out of /nix. I use nix packages on Archlinux at home, and Debian systems as work.
Cross distro development works 100% of the time because Nix doesn't use anything from the distro.
Nix (and Guix) are really what the Linux community should be moving towards IMHO. I personally prefer Nix's syntax, but the underlying technologies are so similar I consider them the same. Guix started as a fork of Nix, and one day I hope they decide to end up becoming compatible with each other again.