Alt text: A line plot with 2 axis (confidence vs competence) referencing the Dunning-Kruger effect with various distro logos placed at different points on the line. Starts with mint/ubuntu near (0,0) and progressing through multiple distros to end up with opensuse/fedora at what it calls “the plateau of sustainability”

      • mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
        1·
        3 days ago

        I wanted to learn more about my system. But I felt like Debian and similar distributions where kind of hardcoded systems and that made the whole OS like a blackbox myth. I thought about Gentoo but I didn’t felt like having to track different configuration and building steps in my head in order to remember what system I had built. I do even struggle to remember how the fuck I did setup my WM in my Debian system.

        Long time ago I also had discovered Guix from the FSF distro list (who hasn’t check that site in some spare time, right?). At the time it felt like the impossible distribution for me. A year and a half ago, with more knowledge in my bag I decided to build my own fully free software laptop by using an X220 Thinkpad (which has the old ME that can be totally disabled), since I wanted to go full tryhard I decided to pick what I felt it was the most obscure fully free software Distro at the time. After discovering what Guix was capable to do I remember thinking why no one has ever thought about this? This is genius! (I did not know about NixOs at the time)

        Having the power of building a reproducible OS that is described with a recipe is amazing. How many times I went into rescue mode for touching things I shouldn’t with Debian? With guix I just rollback my system to a previous description and we are good to go. Guix also is pioneering the full source bootstrap concept which also sounds like something we should really have in our machines. Package descriptions that give you a recipe about how it should be built. And now you can even have a whole description of your home configuration environment! I won’t get lost when configuring WMs or my bash!

        Conceptually it feels elegant and the correct way to build distributions and any software collection in general! Having both the build scripts and definitions written in Guile Scheme is much more convenient than having to embed DSL code like Nix approach. Lisp S-expresions literally feel built for that purpose.

        It is still a young distro, documentation is lacking in some aspects but everybody in the community is passionate about.