if you use guix linux on your daily computer, how well does guix linux work?
- Inicie sesión ou rexístrese para enviar comentarios
https://guix.gnu.org
If you use guix linux on your daily computer, how well does it work?
Thanks.
I am a translator!
It may depend on the program installed with guix. All small command line programs probably work fine. With respect to larger programs, I use gajim, torbrowser and darktable from guix and they work fine.
On one computer, I also have the problem that guix added some path for libraries that is needed for some guix program, and then atril fails because it is trying to use a library from guix that is not the right version. I need to identify the exact issue more precisely, in the mean time I use other tools than atril that don't suffer from that issue.
General issues with guix on trisquel:
- it is important to do the setup indicated in the trisquel page for guix, for the XDG_DATA_DIR variable, otherwise you can't open a MATE session anymore (but if you forgot, you can open a terminal session to fix this)
- it takes a lot of disk space on the root partition, so it is necessary that it is pretty large, or not to have a separate root partition. If not having a separate root partition, it is important to regularly delete old generations and run the garbage collector ("guix package --delete-generations" and "guix gc")
- updating guix ("guix pull" and, for the guix daemon, "sudo -i guix pull") and programs installed by guix ("guix package -u") may require large download and processing. "guix pull" usually takes significant processing. For small packages, "guix package -u" does not download that much, but for something like torbrowser, it can download more than 1 GB. Then, if there is no substitute (i.e., pre-built binary) available for torbrowser, your computer will generate it. On a 11-th generation intel CPU laptop, it can be 2 hours. On my T400, I interrupt it immediately and retry a few days later.
- it happens that update fails (like, server too busy) or that there is a bug or that some updated software does not work anymore, but then it is easy to use the previous version, so no big issue
Guix has very nice packages, I recently installed libretranslate. It downloads about 13 GB at first, but then you have local translation with insignificant processing load.
> guix on trisquel
Have you tested the gnu guix system?
> installed libretranslate.
Does guix provide any local ai options?
I am a translator!
Have you tested the gnu guix system?
Yes. You need to configure your system without graphical interface, there are several "desktop services" but not necessarily finely customized, it is up to the user to do it. There are far less recipes available to do this or that than with Trisquel (for which most Ubuntu recipes normally work), there is no webforum, only mailing list and IRC, and I have the feeling that there are many more developers or scientists using it than average users, so I tend not to understand most of what people talk about. Also, it is a rolling release, then your desktop environment may start working differently at any system update, in ways you like or you don't like.
I keep a guix system to play with, but I don't feel like it could be my main system (because I want things more stable, I like having more recipes and a place to ask for help where I don't feel like an alien, although there are often nice people who try answer my silly questions, but I also often have difficulties understanding their response).
Does guix provide any local ai options?
Are you looking for a particular technology to study, or for programs doing certain tasks? If so, what tasks? I read that libretranslate uses a "neural network" (whatever that means), the only thing that matters to me is that it works locally and is often helpful for me to translate between French and Chinese faster than I would have done manually, although it sometimes gives complete nonsense.
I tried using it for a while with another distro. I continually had trouble installing software and the installations took a long time whether they failed or not.
I tried installing guix by itself and could not get it to install after two or three attempts. The graphical installer would freeze.
That all happened a few years go.
I wrote about my experience with Guix back in 2021: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trying-out-guix-distro
I haven't used it since then, not sure if the experience will be any easier today. My main take-away is that I would partition the hard disk with a smaller fat partition for grub and put everything else on the disk in a btrfs partition for /
And I would use the graphical installer, as the manual installation process always failed for me.
Don't try to let the disk have any other partitions or any other OS's. If you try to have a smaller / partition, the Guix inodes will eat it alive. Or at least that was what was happening in 2021.
I am a member!
Guix appeals to me a lot, but ultimately, I want a "normal" GNU/Linux distro, so I can follow guides people have written on how to do whatever I want to do. With Guix, I have to relearn basic things.
On top of this, Guix isn't as polished as Trisquel. There is no graphical boot screen, and you have to enter your LUKS disk encryption passphrase twice.
Guix offers no fully featured live system for rescue purposes. Trisquel's live system works very well for those purposes.
Guix package manager is slow. This may not seem like a big deal, but a lot of basic tasks like adding users requires using the package manager, because you have to reconfigure to add a user to the system.
I look forward to Guix becoming more polished in the future, but it's not ready yet, in my opinion. I'll stick to a normal distro like Trisquel or Parabola.