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A comment on Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix. Parent comment

Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by n8henrie on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @11:42AM (#34506065)
New to both. In spite of significant interest and weeks of work, I can't even get Guix installed on bare metal on my Mac nor on my older Acer laptop (a converted chromebook) nor on a raspberry pi. New to Nix and have it running with hardly a hitch on all or these.

Reached out to Guix IRC and mailing list with no response (though one helpful HN commenter got back to me -- thank you, and I still need to respond!).

Nix community on the other hand has been extremely helpful on their discourse and has been remarkably welcoming to PRs and contributions in spite of me being a noob.

Will take another look at Guix in a year, it certainly seems to get many things "more right" IMO, but I can't validate that opinion if I can't get it installed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by pxc on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @03:42PM (#34510015)
> I can't even get Guix installed on bare metal on my Mac

macOS is not a supported platform on Guix, right? Is there new/ongoing work to support that?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by n8henrie on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @04:38PM (#34510826)
Correct.

> Is there new/ongoing work to support that?

Not a chance -- very focused on free, from what I gather I don't think they even allow discussion of non-free software.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by pxc on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @07:24PM (#34512614)
Ah so have you been trying to trailblaze to port Guix to macOS a bit, then?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by rekado on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @05:32AM (#34516695)
This will not work.

There's no port of the GNU C Library for macOS, and there's no free toolchain that would let us build binaries for macOS.

Possible routes are:

- virtualization (use a GNU system on top of macOS) - arbitrarily cut the graph and graft macOS-built binaries on top of a huge binary blob specific to macOS

Neither of these seem appealing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by pxc on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @01:09PM (#34521919)
Which of these approaches is used by GNU coreutils, GNU sed, GNU grep, etc., on macOS? I love having them whenever I have to use macOS.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by n8henrie on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @02:17PM (#34522854)
No, not smart enough to "port" exactly, was just trying to get the aarch64 binary to run (no luck), and eventually got it working in a VM: https://n8henrie.com/2022/10/guix-system-guixsd-vm-on-an-m1-...
[ Parent | on HN ]