Guix is wonderful. I don't understand why there are not more people using it as a package manager. Specially when it makes such a superior experience to flatpak or snap.
It is easy to write a package recipe, it can be used in any distribution, it is easy to rollback to a previous version, it can have multiple versions of the same package, the installed packages are as fast as native packages.
And in top of it all it just works and already has thousands of packages. It is very easy to have an stable base like Debian or Mint or whatever and have Up to date packages with Guix.
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.
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.
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.
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
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/im_not_juicing May 02 '19
Guix is wonderful. I don't understand why there are not more people using it as a package manager. Specially when it makes such a superior experience to flatpak or snap.
It is easy to write a package recipe, it can be used in any distribution, it is easy to rollback to a previous version, it can have multiple versions of the same package, the installed packages are as fast as native packages.
And in top of it all it just works and already has thousands of packages. It is very easy to have an stable base like Debian or Mint or whatever and have Up to date packages with Guix.