> Guix and Nix [...] require you to learn a new language
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.
Re:GNU Guix 1.2.0
by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday November 23, 2020 @04:48PM
(#25192341)
So the thing that is the primary value proposition of the system, yeah?
I think the package managers themselves, with unprivileged operation, immutable profiles, atomic upgrades and rollbacks, "guix pack", etc are the main value propositions.
The OS thing is mostly a side effect.
Not sure about guix but the unprivileged part isn’t true of nix as you do need root to install initially.
It is only required because /nix is hardcoded (but only to make using binary caches possible). Later on, writing to this store is done by a nix user, and install can be issued by a normal user.
Re:GNU Guix 1.2.0
by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday November 23, 2020 @07:02PM
(#25193523)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't part of the point that the packages themselves are declarative and you're not beholden to some maintainer to get stuff? Wouldn't that mean writing your own... whatever it is your write to get software installed?
To install stuff with Guix you simply type "guix install foo".
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).
Both. You get to use packages others have written the same way as you do on arch. And you can also decleratively specify your build environkent, or override some attributes like apply a custom patch in a package someone else wrote. But you are just as not required to learn nix, as you don’t need to know how to write a .deb package to use ubuntu
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.