They’re both “immutable” in the sense that they’re setting up either read-only Filesystem Hierarchies (as in bazzite, which uses ostree) or Symlinking their entire filesystem hierarchy to a read-only “store” (as in nixos).

Bazzite uses something called ostree to “diff” the filesystem hierarchy much like git does, while Nix basically makes giant read-only store of files and hashes them, then weaves them all together into a “view” of a filesystem that gets symlinked into the context of a running program.

Something can be Libre without it’s initial distribution being free (as in beer).

That’s how many distributions used to do it in the days when CDs and floppies etc weren’t exactly free.

I have also been done in many times by git-filter-repo. My condolences to the chef.

I’m not sure how you’re getting wallpaper engine to work on Linux because it’s not supported on anything other than windows.

Are you using Wallpaper Engine? If so you are likely going to keep having issues with your screen blanking while you try and use it, as it’s not supported on Linux.

Jokes aside I actually do appreciate that almost all guix packages are verified source and not just copy scripts of already built tarballs.

Guix is awesome!

Nonguix substitute server is down for the fifth straight day, forcing me to rebuild the entire Linux kernel when updating

And you should Never use it!

I agree to some degree but the gnu project doesn’t have a great track record for performative hosting (savannah is very prone to going down for long periods of time.)

I don’t begrudge better hosting infrastructure from a different non-profit.

As a guix user and package maintainer I’m ecstatic.

I’m so proud of the community for rallying around the needs and pain points of everyone and making this decision. This reduces so many pain points for a guix user and will hopefully smooth out the package maintenance process a great deal. Email is simple but trying to do code change communication over it can be very complex and time-laborous.

If you’re curious about functional packaging systems grab guix on your distro and give it a try!

Special shout out to anyone burnt out on Nix lang. Come feel the warm embrace of Scheme’s parentheses. :)

On that front: to developers-

Please make sure you include bash completions for your tools

pre installing flatpaks

Did the room just get a bit colder or is it just me

guix and/or nix

Both are functional package managers and manage dependency trees better than flatpak IMO (also the package description languages mean you can manipulate the package definitions at install time much easier)

If you can’t find a package in guix/nix then it behooves you to use flatpak

Biggest problem to open source health adoption has been the extreme unwillingness to form an international standards group around diagnoses and labeling.

Closest we have is the WHO with ICD but for some fucking inane reason it’s only used reliably by the second and third world. (Ironically this means most African countries have freakishly good digital MAR interop when they can afford to put in a system that uses those standards.)

Some additional nice things about guix:

Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.

Shepherd is hands down the best init program I’ve ever used. It’s just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.

The OS documentation is built into the distro, with “info guix” you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.

About a year and a half.

To be honest it’s not “easy” to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.

To use it like any other distro you’re going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.

Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.

There’s also The toybox

Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I’ve ever had to type out.

The leadership response to this and the subsequent backlash is starting to remind me of the NixOS debacle from about a year ago.

That resulted in the project being split and like 30% of the community moving off and creating Lix.

I would be disappointed, but not surprised, if we see something similar in the Kernel sometime in the next year or two…

Man you better hope the kernel community gets its shit together then, cause Krummrich (the primary developer for nova and getting those changes upstreamed) is one of guys that got told their project was cancer by the “thin blue line” maintainer (Hellwig) from the article.

Nouveau is important because Nouveau is the default driver in Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, and ever other distro.

Linux distributions can’t easily distribute the proprietary nvidia drivers or the slightly less proprietary nvidia-open drivers so they depend on nouveau as the default nvidia driver. When you install a distro it usually has to use the nouveau drivers before downloading the proprietary blobs from Nvidia.

Nouveau is the only reason anyone can use Linux on an Nvidia card long enough to install the other drivers.

It’s also actively maintained, receiving updates that get upstreamed almost daily.

I’m not sure what about those things says “defunct”.

And the rust developments in Asahi for the M1+ series of CPUs don’t just benefit Mac but all the ARM CPUs as well.

A few people from a downstream project like Asahi or an almost defunct driver like Nouveau

I’m not sure why you think Asahi is a minor player in the linux community when they’re responsible in the entirety for porting Linux to the Arm-based Mac M1+ series, or why you think Nouveau is defunct.

“the process works” Is I think how he phrased it. 🙄