this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
24 points (100.0% liked)
libre
10142 readers
39 users here now
Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR, take Linux Mint for a spin. If you're ready to take the plunge, flock to Fedora! If you're a computer hobbyist and love DIY, use Arch, Gentoo, Guix or the many, many offerings out there.
- Those on Apple Silicon Macs can consult Asahi Linux for available options.
Rules
- Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
- Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
- All site-wide rules still apply
Artwork
- Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
- Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
- Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Are there any good guides/tutorials for guix?
I liked the nix approach but some of the way it was managed (anduril) put me off it. I found the universal blue distros got closest to what I wanted to do in nix anyway, but if guix can get close to that experience I would like to check it out.
Guix System is still niche enough that finding real-world examples will be difficult, but not impossible if you are persistent. As @hello_hello@hexbear.net said, the documentation is very well done and comprehensive for the most part. Very few methods and properties are still undocumented, but they do exist and that can be a pain to navigate if you're not prepared to dive into Scheme source code. I really appreciate David Wilson of System Crafters, he is very knowledgeable and a lot of his prior work with Emacs configuration was in my wheelhouse anyway. Same with David Thompson, who has contributed a lot of tools utilizing Scheme that were particularly relevant to my hobbyist sysadmin work. I think Guix, like Emacs, requires a very stretchy sort of mind to really take advantage of and get into, and it takes a long time to pay off. If universal blue is working for you, then I'd recommend just playing around with the package manager part of Guix first, and if you wind up liking it then try out the full Guix System.
+1 on using guix on a foreign distribution. It gives you some flexibility in how to set up software. For example, I'm on an asahi macbook so a lot of ARM platform packages on the default CI server haven't been compiled or there isn't support yet (for example openjdk on arm has no substitutes).
In those cases you can then decide to either package a binary release of said software or use containers, and if both of those don't work then install distro packages systemwide.
The guix manual is a good starting point. SystemCrafters has articles on guix and guile but they're more like blogs and can be outdated. Guix cookbook has some good examples to check out.
Guix source code is also a good way to learn, since most everything is written in self describing lisp you can learn by example. Theres a lot more rough patches in guix than what you'd get with nixos ootb, I'd recommend looking into universal blue first and then augmenting that with guix if you can.