Switching to Guix

I’m putting some serious thought into switching my main system – coreboot x220 – to Guix. The barrier to entry is shrinking: I’ve figured out how to make a keyd service and from that I was able to extrapolate and make the Nix package manager work so I have Nix under Guix. If I move my x220 to Guix, I’ll be able to experiment just as much with Nix as I do now without my store growing out of control. I get the niceties of Guix and determinate systems without SystemD. It’s just NixOS that needs SystemD, not the packages I use. So if I switch, I get to keep all the cool stuff from Nix, keep on learning how that all works, and add in learning everything I can about Guix.

a keyd service

Nix under Guix

a brief aside on space problems

Yeah, that’s something not a lot of people talk about, but my nix store, even with aggressive garbage cleaning and enabling space optimizations, I’ve had multiple systems that needed serious attention to resolve. My dead M1 Macbook Pro is one such system. I had actually booted up a live cd so I could manually destroy the nix store and recreate it. Despite that I was using only one generation and had enabled various space saving optimizations, I reached the point where I didn’t have the space to rebuild anymore. I’ve somewhat mitigated the problem on my Raspberry Pi systems by just building the installer instead of installing it and rebuilding the system. That is, I generate what’s basically the installation image with all the applications I would have installed, and then I just run stuff from there.

The problem rears its ugly head with frequent changes and rebuilding. Systems that I don’t rebuild on until I have a good image that I’ve tested somewhere else don’t notice the problem as much. But my main systems (which is now basically just the x220 because of hardware issues I’ve faced on the others) are running out of space. I dont know if this space issue will recur on Guix or not. But I have two older systems running Guix right now. I can keep using those as my test subjects for figuring out how things work and then add the stuff that’s worth keeping to my main system once I’ve spent time beating up the guinea pigs.

my other Guix systems

My intel mackbook air and my t430 are both running Guix. I’ve been trying stuff out one one system, and then recreating experiments on the other to verify that the process I’ve come up with for whatever I’m toying with is reproducible from the documentation perspective. Obviously the configuration is fully reproducible. If something in the setup turns out not to be accurately reproduced and I want to keep a working reference, I could always just wipe one of them and start over without losing the other.

The macbook air is working surprisingly well given that it’s older. Building things doesn’t take as long as I would expect and even though the screen is only 1366x768 it’s brighter and clearer than the thinkpads I have. The keyboard is also decent. It’s less stiff than the 430, but a little stiffer than the x220.

The T430 keyboard is kind of bouncy, the laptop itself is quite heavy, but it also has an internal DVD drive. It was a sub $100 used laptop that I originally wanted to try to use ivyrain or something to exploit it and get coreboot on it. If my attempts at using hardware flashers hadn’t all failed miserably on other chips, I’d probably be more willing to plow ahead and do that still.

I likely will not put Guix on my pi laptop

I haven’t put Guix on any of my SBCs. I’m experiencing some hardware issues with the cheap LCD displays I’ve got on those and I’m considering strategies to remove the displays and keep using them as headless nodes. I haven’t yet looked into what Guix can do on them, I’m optimistically assuming most hardware features wont work and that I’ll be left with barely usable nodes that I can maybe use to run mesh nodes. So I expect I’ll keep a zero 2w and a pi4 running NixOS for now. These are my pi laptops with tiny keyboards that are super nice to type on.

so what’s the end goal?

I get to ditch SystemD, keep learning Nix, and also enjoy something new.

Tags: index, guix, nix

Tags

#index

#guix

#nix