Reader supplied reviews for Guix System Distribution



Average rating

8.2 from 12 review(s)





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Version: -- 0.16.0 0.15.0 0.13.0 0.12.0 0.9.0



Rating: -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10



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Past reviews - sort by: Date Votes

Version: 0.16.0

Rating: 3

Date: 2018-12-06

Votes: 3





Ouch! This distro is painful to install and after I was able to get it up and running it was very unstable and froze just moving the mouse. I'm not completely sure that it's the O/S's fault as I installed it as a VM.





Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 0.15.0

Rating: 7

Date: 2018-11-18

Votes: 9





I was interested in switching to GuixSD from Gentoo, as I like the concept of having your entire system config defined in a single file, and having transactional system "states".



Install is relatively easy (even though it took me around 10 attempts). I had to merge the barebones.scm bios grub-boot and the lightweight-desktop.scm desktop's config, to get it working with i3-wm.



Compared to my Gentoo stack, I had 1000 extra packages. Coupled with the fact that most of these have to be compiled from source (very little substitutes (binaries) provided from the build farm), installs and upgrades take forever. Do to some bug, most versions of rust only compile with 1 or 2 threads. I think I had 5 version of rust required on my computer. Imagine the compile time.



IceCat: It just sucks. I didn’t think it would suck, but it does. It is not firefox. I cannot get Stylus, Old-Reddit, and many addons installed. For some reason, it does not seem to be compatible with many firefox addons. This makes it nearly useless for me.



Lack of: System-config-printer, Printer Drivers, xsane, Cadence.



Broken: virt-manager



Libre Issues:

I love libre software. I love the FSF. I hate libre-distros. They make it really hard for me to work with people outside, that do not use or know about libre-software. No flash for websites that need it. Also like I said, icecat doesn’t even work with many firefox addons, and you can’t install firefox because it’s non-free. Great.



Paths:

Everything is installed in different directory’s (/gnu/store) and applications don't know this. Currently my bash shell understands no commands except “pwd” and “whoami”. It’s fubared. That’s with copying system-paths using guix package –search-paths. I don’t even know anymore, I’m back to Gentoo for now.





Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 0.15.0

Rating: 8

Date: 2018-07-13

Votes: 22





Brilliant ideas, comprehensible minimal installation, and the package manager is working very well on other distributions.



But the distribution still doesn't install and run easily. I'm dying to see what 1.0 will bring. This is a very worthy project that needs more time to cook.





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