Guixing

I've been eyeing NixOS for a while now but its recipes are in a language too foreign for me to understand. All this having multi versions installed side by side has been a developers dream of mine since I started doing freelance software development many years ago. Although I am more and more in a position to chose my stack, I'd still like my versions as close as I can get them to whatever is running in production without having to hassle with containers and VMs during software development.

When I first found out about Guix I though it would take a while for it to get into a usable state and, I must admit, the "freedom" bit had me worried about compatibility with hardware I own. Then Solène posted her notes about nonguix which led me to reconsider and offer up my work laptop to do some experimenting. Many "guix system reconfigure" and reboots later, I now have something that gets very close to a dream setup.

Solène - Extend Guix Linux with the nonguix repository

All my (work and hobby) projects now have all their dependencies automatically installed through direnv with guix environment and the full recipe to setup an OS for this is in a single scheme file! How cool is that? Oh, yes.. true.. I still need to fiddle with channels first to get access to the nonguix stuff but it's still way cooler than doing apt-get, dselect and trying to restore whatever made sense in the /etc directory.

Next step: migrating my main kit to guix.. but not today, it's Friday beer time!

Cheers,

R.

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📅 2021-06-25

🏷 guix

📧 hello@rwv.io

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