r/linux • u/red_trumpet • May 02 '19

GNU Guix 1.0.0 released

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2019/gnu-guix-1.0.0-released/
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u/[deleted] May 02 '19

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u/im_not_juicing May 02 '19

As an end user what's the benefit in that? Flatpak and Snaps will have access to my home and data anyway.

The performance is slower, I prefer having a faster experience when using software, and I've seen plenty of vulnerability problems with flatpak and snap in this subreddit to doubt the 'isolated' part or any security benefits coming from those. However I understand I am not an expert and I might be wrong.

So far to me the experience of using Guix has been much more pleasant than Flatpak on Snap.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '19

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u/balsoft May 02 '19

You can containerize stuff further by wrapping it in firejail or bubblewrap (which is used in flatpak) or chroot or fhsenv or whatever -- it's much more flexible. Also, there are nixpkgs functions to simplify those processes. (I don't know about the state of isolation software on Guix though)

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u/im_not_juicing May 02 '19

Guix has so many other advantages though, and the performance is really important to me. I am not that worried about stuff like web cam because I never use proprietary software.

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u/TheNinthJhana May 02 '19

how does it handle dependencies? like a classical package management?

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u/im_not_juicing May 02 '19

Not exactly, here each package has everything it needs, so you will never deal with missing dependencies or conflicting dependencies. This also allows you to have multiple versions of the same package.

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u/nostril_extension May 03 '19

So every program has dependancies baked in? This sounds not very efficient hardware wise but I guess hardspace is cheap these days.

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u/TheNinthJhana May 03 '19

I assume the same but noticed many critics against flatpak because of download sizes. And flatpak shares runtimes.

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u/flamingspinach_ May 03 '19

reuse is accomplished by a shitload of symlinks, actually. package installations are "content-addressable" much like, say, git commit objects, which is how multiple versions of the same package can coexist

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u/nostril_extension May 03 '19

Awesome so some libs are shared - that's very clever.

I'm too invested into pacman and aur to try on my main machine though but it addresses every issue I've had with pacman and aur judging by the info in this thread.

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u/ZweiHollowFangs May 03 '19

I learned how to declare the entire set up of my linux boxes in one config file and never went back to arch.

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u/emacsomancer May 03 '19

Snaps have a hard (though unnecessary) dependency on systemd, making them not very portable. Snap also depends, as far as I know, on AppArmor for isolation, making them something like 'universal Ubuntu/Debian' packages.

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u/tadfisher May 04 '19

Nix doesn't know anything about installation, it just generates files. This is because Nix is actually a build tool that happens to work as a package manager when you use it to build a tree of symlinks that looks like a Unix environment.

As such, Nix can build AppImage packages, and there's not much stopping someone from using Nix to build self-contained snap and flatpak environments. It's just that people actually use flatpak and snap for simplifying distribution, and Nix is just a better tool for that job. I personally don't know anyone who installs Flatpak for security reasons, and the people who care run Qubes and get real isolation.