this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
21 points (95.7% liked)
libre
10182 readers
5 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 Debian and design your dream system!
- 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 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The upside of Guix's thoroughness is that every package must be compiled from source, so this means that there are no random blobs or binary bootstraps scattered around like there is in nixpkgs.
Nix flake boosters love talking about how "reproducible" they are until you realize their solution to version pinning is to copy the entire package world, which is akin to cutting down a tree with a nuke. This is a well known problem even given the community name "100 pinnings of nixpkgs" and no one wants to shake the hornets nest.
Guix instead maintains its world as a git repository in the system so every user is compelled to have the latest Guix checkout and then use pinnings on packages themselves and not the entire package set.
Definitely recommend trialing Guix as much as you can, I don't really have any hope in NixOS since the org is so unwilling to break the silence on anything technical or community related. Also they recently obtained an enterprise grant for GitHub so you can see where their priorities and values lie.
I do like the approach that lix and aux are seemingly working towards where there are smaller independent package collections that get linked together somehow. I'm not sure how that would all work, but I do think it's important to keep build size down to something a few motivated individuals can compile on affordable machines. Without something like trustix you inevitably end up needing a huge centralized build farm and CDN to have a useful binary cache. IMO that's the main obstacle to making a viable community driven nixos alternative.