Back to debian 😔.

GUIX was cool but really not right (yet) for either desktop or server use, at least for me. I really like the thing I was looking for in it, which is declarative configuration of nearly the entire system and that part worked flawlessly. And scheme is fun. But here are some significant pain points:

• They only have Linux Libre in the main repos. Linux Libre is a pointless security hole whose only practical purpose is to nudge people to get hardware that uses open microcode or that has vendors pushing bios updates for as long as you have your device. This is basically zero personal computers. It is so thoroughly patched that you can't even feasibly load your own microcode on top of it with any reliability. So to have basic security with a normal computer, you have to use the repos and kernel of the undocumented sister project nonguix.
• Nonguix being undocumented wasn't a huge issue for me, but having something as critical as the kernel have such little focus and upkeep is a disaster. Just trying to pin the kernel to an lts release was surprisingly challenging due to the dual repos needed and them being out of sync re: 6.12 and 6.18.
• The nonguix repos were effectively down for like a week for "substitutes" (binaries), meaning you'd have to either wait (like me) or compile the kernel etc, which takes quite some time.
• The main repos broke my browser for over 3 weeks and so I switched to flatpaks. I also realized it was using a version from over 6 months ago, largely unlatched. My browser was broken at the packaging level, so I could not update my system (or at least half of it) until I decided to partially abandon the main draw for me, declarative management.
• The guile parts were oddly slow. guix shell is cool but using it to make a system container that stimulates a typical Linux filesystem has a 1-5 second start time due to mostly guile itself taking a long time to load modules. But this is also the wrapper tool! So if you want to use a snappy cli tool that needs this emulation, you either now have a clunky one or you have to (like me) do things like write a bubble wrap script with no fewer than 30 flags and yes, their exact order is very important.
• No real "offline reconfigure". You can tell it to not use substitutes and it will work that way, but only if nothing needs to be downloaded, so you have to sit there and watch it to be sure or else it might download compile something. This means every reconfigure has a 5-20 second delay while it gathers its guile modules and checks for binaries remotely that it won't need to download. Then it reconfigures to add my one setting change in like a half second.
• Various applications are much slower for whatever reason, even with flatpaks. Possibly due to the nonstandard filesystem and need to do elf patching, but I don't really know.
• Modularizing your config requires creating a guile module. That part is easy and fun but now you have to either add it to your guile paths for the things you define to be recognized by your reconfiguration commands and ide you use to edit them. Or turn it into a "channel". If you add it to your paths, it's advised against doing so globally via your shell environment. This leaves you relying on temporary environment variable declarations and inconsistent cli tool flags. And adds oddly large amounts of load time overhead. If you forget to add just the right guile module path flags to just the right programs, you will get an opaque error, usually in the parent calling module, and have to guess and check. If you use a channel, you can't actually use any changes you make until you commit to the repo, so you can't do a "add this, run, then commit" workflow. You have to switch up "add this, commit, run, and revert if it broke" workflow, which I hate.

Really the eventual deal breakers for me were the security issues (linux-libre, nonguix linux servers down, unupdatable system, old and unpatched security critical packages) and the necessity and difficulty of FHS filesystem emulation for tools I needed, but it all also just kind of added up until I had to give up on it because I couldn't practically work around some of these limitations, namely the kernel and packaging issues. The former being a poor design choice and the latter being an issue of design choice (rolling distribution) and not having enough maintainers. I'd have started helping with the latter issue myself but I wasn't sure I would be sticking around.

Anyways it is still a very cool system and is not itself a bad thing at all despite my criticisms. The actual core system is very cool and structurally sound aside from the fact that it should probably use fewer macros (not lintable) and guile needs a faster engine. I hope GUIX does well and I hope I can try it out again with some of these issues resolved and start making my own contributions. But back to the grill pill FOSS distro, debian my dearest.