Hi all, I’m a new guild supporter and forum member, and I’m looking forward to being a part of this community
I’ve been in the Nix ecosystem for the past year, and now I want to check out Guix System as a development (and possibly a production) environment.
I’m particularly interested in “living” in emacs (Guix + emacs + EXWM), as well as leveraging gptel to build and test software with generative AI, and to run other experiments on my system.
Some questions to help smooth the adjustment from NixOS to Guix System:
Is there guidance for mimicking impermanence using disko? This is based on Graham Christensen’s “Erase Your Darlings” (which is a bit out of date). Or is there guidance for declarative disk partitioning?
What’s the state of the art in terms of hardening Guix System? Or where is the best place to find this information?
Are there conventions for configuring multi-host setups? I plan to get started running a Guix VMware guest on a macOS host, as well as on the bare metal of an old Dell laptop. However, I’m also interested running Guix System in my could infra (e.g. production app, db, monitoring/analytics, etc.).
Lastly, I want to start my Guix journey by using literate configuration with org-mode, and I would be grateful for any related references.
@wxie , thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check that out.
Completely separately, for anyone considering getting started with Guix System, I do not recommend starting in a VM on macOS if you have another path available to you. I’m very blessed to have download speeds up to 700 Mbps+ where I live/work, I dedicated 7 cores, ~15GB of RAM, and 100GB of memory to the VM, and it has still been terribly slow and glitchy. This was after completely failing to build ARM64 and x86_64 systems using VMware Fusion Professional Version 13.6.3 (24585314).
If you absolutely must take this path (UTM on macOS), you might want to start on a Friday evening as soon as you get off of work, and then plan to reserve the rest of the weekend to get the system into a usable state. Or set up a build server on a VPS to do the heavy lifting ahead of time. And prepare to exercise patience like you’re training for a marathon.
I’m currently working on migrating my configuration to a roughly 10-year-old Dell Precision 5520 that I shelved because of an expanding battery issue, but that I’m glad I held on to. I think this will be a much more enjoyable experience. As a silver lining, I guess this means I’m going to get to answer my own question about multi-host setups
Despite these early friction points, I’m still really excited to start living in emacs and exploring Guix System as an alternative to my NixOS dev env. And I’ve become more motivated to build some infra solutions (like build servers) to speed up local development, which I think will be fun.
If any of you have advice for setting up cloud infra on Guix System – especially on Hetzner Cloud – I’d be super grateful. Or even running Guix on NixOS in production, which might be where I land when all is said and done.
As for other hosters I would build in a VM and then generate an install ISO for this system.scm to upload and run on the VPS. But I’ve never done it and others who did could chime in with there experience hardened knowledge.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve seen this and think it could be interesting for personal projects. For production deployments I’d feel more comfortable with a large provider like Hetzner.
As for other hosters I would build in a VM and then generate an install ISO for this system.scm to upload and run on the VPS.
This is a good idea and probably what I’m going to attempt as soon as I’ve finished building Guix System on an old Linux laptop. Assuming I have success, I’ll come back here and let people know what worked/didn’t in case there’s interest from other folks to do the same thing.
Good grief ( ), I finally have Guix System working on bare metal. The System Crafters image from 12/24 appeared to use the libre kernel so I ended up just using the official ISO.
I wish I would’ve written down everything I tried so I could help others avoid the same pain, but here are some high-level points:
Do yourself a favor and get a USB → Ethernet adapter if you don’t have an Ethernet port on your machine. This gives you more flexibility if you need to install Guix with the libre kernel first, and it may improve download speeds.
Use Codeberg instead of Savannah and save yourself hours of time.
It’s much easier to install Guix System on a new partition from within a working Linux OS (NixOS for me). Don’t be like me and wipe everything from Ubuntu Live and then try the install from the Live image.
I probably would’ve saved a ton of troubleshooting time by just RTFM for grub. Lesson learned.
This is a pretty basic tip, but I think it’s always nice to run the setup from another machine via SSH in case you need to copy/paste a bunch of commands, or wget/curl/nc scripts to the new machine to avoid having to manually type stuff… I used Claude Code to generate these scripts (for installing, profiling, bug hunting/troubleshooting, etc.) and spin up a python HTTP server on my network to download them on the Guix machine, and I think this saved a ton of time.
Next steps:
Version control all my system configs so (God forbid) if I ever have to start from scratch again I can avoid a lot of this pain.
Compare Sway to EXWM (and Wayland to X11). I was gung-ho about using EXWM at first, but I saw some of David’s comments (about using emacs being enough) in a recent video/stream and think maybe EXWM could be overkill for what I want to do.
Set up my Rails development environment (I really like devenv + direnv in NixOS and want to recreate as much of this as I can; tips appreciated!).
How many of your original goals did you end up accomplishing? I have many of the same ambitions, but time is scarce. I would love to hear about where you landed.
It’s been a while since I made the decision – so I don’t remember exactly what precipitated it – but I think it had to do with me experiencing less friction and having to jump through fewer hoops getting NixOS/nix-darwin set up on different machines (both physical and virtual). Kind of a path of least resistance thing, if that makes sense.
I’d like to see healthy competition in this space so I’ll continue to keep my eye on Guix.
Edit: looking back at my goals, there was also one more thing – I decided to go all-in with the Elixir ecosystem instead of going back to Ruby/Rails. So starting late-last Fall I spent all my free time reading text books, taking online courses, and building demo apps. It was easier for me to do that in environments where I was already pretty cozy.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for digging through your notes to provide a more complete answer!
As a noob coming from macOS, nix-darwin was one of the things I was really getting excited about prior to choosing Guix. I would probably have settled comfortably into the Nix ecosystem, but the flake controversy and state of the community was a bit of a deterrent for me. I have also been reading SICP, so scheme > the nix DSL.
Hi, @chops I am no proficient at computers in general, so all the coding and developing part I cannot tell. I use my computer to my daily study, mail, lectures… and some learning, like the scheme course :))
I have guix on bare metal, and I did like you, installed the libre version, and afterwards I added nonguix to get wifi working. I have a dualboot with debian, which is a trouble-saver when you need to fix anything. I am happy with stumpwm in guix, and one of my goals is improving my hability to configure stumpwm and emacs better with guile. Some years ago I used EXWM, I liked it. I have it now in guixos, buy I see it needs some config, and I have had no time to investigate, at the moment.
The state of the community is what caused me to evaluate Guix as an alternative; it’s certainly a valid concern.
For me it was a pretty easy decision to adopt flakes right away. I understand there’s some controversy, and they’re still “experimental”, but they have such widespread support I’m not worried about any potential consequences at this point.
p.s. SICP is probably my favorite programming/CS book. I watched all the MIT and UC Berkeley online lectures back in the day. Enjoy!
I just want to reiterate this for anyone who comes across this thread in the future. It’s been a while since I went through this process, but I recall it being much easier to trouble-shoot with a dual-boot than using an install disc, if that makes sense.
), I finally have Guix System working on bare metal. The System Crafters image from 12/24 appeared to use the libre kernel so I ended up just using the official ISO.
