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A comment on Trying Guix: A Nixer's Impressions. Parent comment

Re:Trying Guix: A Nixer's Impressions by yjftsjthsd-h on Saturday July 19, 2025 @04:40AM (#44613692)
> But both of them are equally easy to install open source only or include proprietary

Unless it really dramatically changed recently, I don't think that's true. Look, here's the official manual page that describes exactly how to enable use of the non-free packages that are right there in the main nixpkgs repo:

https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-allow-unfree

And here's the guix equivalent, maintained in a completely separate repo that you're not allowed to talk about, document, or refer to in any official channels: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

These are not equal.

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Re:Trying Guix: A Nixer's Impressions by guilhas on Saturday July 19, 2025 @10:23AM (#44615704)
> These are not equal.

Of course they are. Copy and paste a text snippet to your configuration, and run the cli to refresh

Being a separate repo is absolutely OK. Just like installing Nixos's own Home-Manager

Or add other people channels, like adding PPA on Ubuntu/debian. Or run flakes...

Nixos is possibly makes it more confusing by having the documentation recommend `nix-channel --add` instead of the declarative approach. Having the standard declarative, and having flakes on top

And you should probably want to create your own channel. On the week I installed Guix immediately created my channel and packaged ZimWiki

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Re:Trying Guix: A Nixer's Impressions by yjftsjthsd-h on Saturday July 19, 2025 @10:37PM (#44621494)
> Of course they are. Copy and paste a text snippet to your configuration, and run the cli to refresh

Even in the best case, that requires you to know about it. When you're not allowed to document the option or even mention it in official support channels, that's harder.

> Being a separate repo is absolutely OK. Just like installing Nixos's own Home-Manager

> Or add other people channels, like adding PPA on Ubuntu/debian. Or run flakes...

> And you should probably want to create your own channel. On the week I installed Guix immediately created my channel and packaged ZimWiki

All of these things make it harder to use and less likely to stay supported.

> Nixos is possibly makes it more confusing by having the documentation recommend `nix-channel --add` instead of the declarative approach. Having the standard declarative, and having flakes on top

So... I agree that that's annoying, and I personally would prefer that everyone agree to use flakes, but AFAIK you don't need to do that to enable unfree in nix? Or is this an unrelated argument against nix that's separate from the point about unfree software?

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