It’s a bit of a nitpick, but I’d argue there’s more than one critical mass, and NixOS is already there for the purposes of tinkerers and some early adopters. General Linux people are next, and it’s probably not quite there, which is I think what you’re getting at.

Since it’s the frontrunner as you point out, I have high hopes it will make it.

Keeping a community going is a beast all on it’s own, which is probably what’s missing. Lemmy was pretty dead before Reddit refugees arrived too, or so I hear.

OP didn’t clarify whether they were talking about Guix System or Guix the package manager

That was actually deliberate. I pretty much figured it’s niche enough to discuss them all together without confusion.

Moderately. Same rough idea, with a few other things in the blend. For example, I found it via GNU Shepard, which it uses, while Nix sounds like it just uses systemd. The Guix package manager will also compile things from source with custom options if it needs.

Based on what I’ve heard so far: GNU Shepard instead of systemd, a package manager that compiles things from source and allows user-defined compiler options, a totally different way of arranging system files, and Guile-Scheme is used for everything; it sounds like there’s no other kind of configuration anywhere.

It also uses Linux-libre by default, although you can go back to plain Linux, and they’re working on Hurd.

Yes, that’s a great review! Having one language for everything also sounds pretty great. A hard line on nonfree software is pretty tough, but I’m glad to hear you can “downgrade” back to the Linux kernel if you need to deal with a GPU or something.

That’s barely an opinion, haha! That’s pretty much just what it is.

TIL.

Another interesting thing about Guix is that it compiles everything itself (with an option to outsource the heavy lifting in case you’re on a Raspberry Pi or something). Layers of abstraction not talking to each other properly is a conceptual pet peeve of mine, so I like the idea of everything being visible to the compiler like that.

So I guess they just wanted to use an established language?

So, I actually learned about Guix via GNU Shepard. It sounds like NixOS just uses systemd, which I don’t love. Not in a dramatic way, and I’m currently running systemd, but it does break the Unix philosophy.

A Haskell-based package manager would be pretty dope (seeing as that’s the gold standard for that sort of language). I wonder if someone’s working on it.

Cool. An example, for the curious.

What’s the right one?

Ancient MacBook gang represent.