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submitted 2 days ago by paequ2@lemmy.today to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Trying out Guix for the first time! Waiting for packages to download.

I'm a long time Arch user. Any tips?!

I've heard there aren't as many packages for Guix as other distros, but I was thinking Flatpak and distrobox will help bridge the gap for me.

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[-] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I've not used Guix but I don't think any distro has anything close to number of desirable available packages as arch--- so be prepared for that. My ventures into debian, suse and fedora were made quite annoying by having to work around the many missing packages. Including user-facing applications, dependencies and background programs. I never quite got down with distrobox, maybe that's the cure.

this chart on wikipedia gives the impression that Debian has more packages but that's not the way it feels when you are looking for something. Maybe they have a lot of dot matrix printer libraries from 1992 or something which bring the number up.

Arch includes a lot of not-at-all-free packages (which it is impossible to distinguish in pacman or other tool as far as I can find), orphaned, new packages that haven't yet made it into other repos, and packages where no attempt has been made to submit them to other repos.

On arch I have virtually never had to go outside the repos for packages. It's very hard to give up once you are used to it. (Even though it's better to use properly libre/free stuff and other benefits of a more curated approach like security, stability and quality.)

[-] lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago

The thing about Guix (and Nix) is that there doesnt need to be a package in the repos. You can either make your system automatically compile from source (which is how many AUR packages work) or use something like distrobox, bottles, flatpak to run extra software

[-] paequ2@lemmy.today 3 points 1 day ago

use something like distrobox, bottles, flatpak to run extra software

YES! That's my plan! I think I just figured out how to configure flakpak a little better.

These are only part of the steps needed: https://flatpak.org/setup/GNU%20Guix

You also need to source ~/.guix-profile/etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh in order to get the desktop icons to show up in the GNOME app launcher. (Using guix home for that!)

Need to work on getting distrobox setup next. I was able to guix install distrobox, but it requires some extra configuration apparently.

[-] paequ2@lemmy.today 1 points 17 hours ago

Btw, here's the guix home configuration file I used to add the contents of flatpak.sh into my ~/.profile, in order to update the XDG_DATA_HOME env var.

(use-modules (gnu home)
             (gnu home services shells)
             (guix gexp)
             (gnu services))

(home-environment
  (services
    (list
      (simple-service 'flatpak-service
                      home-shell-profile-service-type
                      (list (local-file
                              (string-append (getenv "HOME") "/.guix-profile/etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh")
                              "flatpak.sh"))))))
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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