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Written by futurile on 2025-01-24 at 13:31

The #guix survey's results are out!

Posting things I found interesting!

1. Guix has a fantastically committed community

We've never done a survey before, so I was really worried about how many would take part. Over 900 participants did so!

Even more amazing - 150 people took part who were previous users or contributors! Thank-you for taking the time.

Thanks all!

It means the results are a great sample. Read the posts:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-1/

[#]scheme #linux #scheme #lisp #gnu #nix

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Descendants

Written by RJ on 2025-01-24 at 14:17

@futurile I've only just heard of GUIX through System Crafters on YouTube/Twitch - I know the basics of Linux - should I move to GUIX? How, why, where's a good (community recommended) walkthrough of getting it onto my ThinkPad. I do see it has the option to run on QEMU/QuickEMU - would that be a start? I use i3 as a window manager and just started getting interested in Emacs

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Written by futurile on 2025-01-24 at 14:55

@aarRJaay If you've never used #linux then I wouldn't recommend #guix as your first Linux.

The survey shows Guix users are knowledgeable Linux users (https://mastodon.social/@futurile/113883616245233405) - it's similar to #nix in this.

I would start with something like #ubuntu and then when you have experience move to #guix 😁

You can also install Guix as a 'hosted' packaged manager on top of any Linux: that's how I started. Lots of users have it on top of #debian #archlinux #suse #fedora etc - so lots of options!

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Written by RJ on 2025-01-24 at 15:40

@futurile Thank you for your advice - I'm very happy with using Linux - I use Arch BTW ;) - I'll certainly get it going in a VM - I assume I can then take that config and run it on the bare-metal laptop when it's running as I want.

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Written by futurile on 2025-01-24 at 16:13

@aarRJaay Yes, that's how I did it. You land-up with a declarative configuration that you can use in #kvm, and then you can use it (possibly with some minimal changes for kernel modules) on hardware. For more hardware there's the #nonguix repo which has all the proprietary drivers!

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Written by Andres Moreno on 2025-01-24 at 16:29

@aarRJaay @futurile

You'll have to deal with firmware but, yes, it should be really close

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Written by RJ on 2025-01-26 at 11:57

@monkey1 @futurile thank you - I'll set some time aside at some point to have a go - it sounds really interesting

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Written by futurile on 2025-01-24 at 14:57

@aarRJaay Equally don't want to put you off, as you're getting into #emacs. Systemcrafters is a great community - there's also the users mailing list - and lots of people on #guix IRC! I would definitely start running it inside a VM image - that way (if you're like me ...) when something goes wrong it's no big deal!

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Written by Jesse on 2025-01-24 at 15:31

@futurile One upside to Guile Scheme I didn't see mentioned in the survey that's huge for me (though I've only dipped my toe into #guix thus far), is the simple "not a DSL" aspect.

Too many tools use DSL's unnecessarily, which just adds cognitive debt. A relatively minimalist general purpose language is IMO usually friendlier + more rewarding of the time learning it. And when it's a #lisp, you can (if you're a hipster) get going pretty quickly even if it's a dialect you haven't touched before!

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Written by futurile on 2025-01-24 at 18:17

@jaawerth Nice! Yes, I don't recall a specific comment from someone setting that out - people identified "Guile and Scheme are cool" but I guess the benefit of it being a general language rather than a DSL was implicit.

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Written by Jesse on 2025-01-24 at 18:38

@futurile

Fair, it probably is, implicit, but I can't resist calling out the upside as long as so many other tools keep DSLing me 😂

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Written by Janneke on 2025-01-25 at 13:15

@jaawerth @futurile well, maybe that is because Guix provides a Domain Specific Language (DSL) in Guile.

So saying that Guix uses Guile (instead of a toy language) pretty much covers it.

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Written by futurile on 2025-01-25 at 18:01

@janneke @jaawerth Yeah - in a lot of my blog posts I've put that you don't have to know Guile to use Guix.

I think the Guix functions are so good you can use it as a DSL with no understanding of the surrounding Scheme ... and then when you're more advanced you have the power of Guile to do all the cool things!

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