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GNU Guix 1.0.0 has been released. The big 1.0 is an important milestone for most Free Software. In this case it is the result of seven years of development. GNU Guix is a general toolbox for software deployment, also known as a package manager, but with advancements over RPM and APT, which it can co-exist with. However it can also be used as a complete distro.
In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:54PM
Last time I tried Nix (similar idea to Guix, declarative OS/package management), unfortunately a lot of things depend on shared libraries and envvars being laid out just so, and due to the nature of the declarative/stateless config, every single package basically gets its own environment and set of shared libs. This is extremely painful when it bites you because there is no escape hatch. Example: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/902 [github.com]
The "co-exist with rpm and apt" is another big lie. It's technically true (they can co-exist as long as you don't try to run anything), but again the shared libs are complete separate, meaning lots of random things break because they weren't linked with the same libraries as the services they talk to for example.
IMO Bedrock Linux is a much more interesting and superior approach. BL enables you to stack different distros (e.g., run a machine with packages from Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Gentoo playing nice together) and it has actually done the hard technical work of getting all the disparate packages to play nice together and link to the right libraries which Nix/Guix tries to handwave away.
For running reproducible production systems, Docker/container is just a lot more practical and easy to set up than Nix/Guix, and for a workstation the declarative/stateless approach is also more trouble than it's worth.
In summary, it's nice in theory, but it doesn't quite work out in practice.
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