this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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What makes this different from https://aux.computer? And with just ten people - such a small community, to maintain what, a parallel fork that will eventually be forced to accept patches from Nix repos? How does it protect against, let's say, corporate decisions? Wouldn't that seep into their project too? Not trying to demotivate them, but I fear that this could be the fate of their project.
There's Guix, which is an official GNU project. If anyone is willing to learn a little bit of Guile Scheme - look, the language is great, the project isn't contaminated with multiple scripts, project skeleton is much better, the modules are well written, so why not move over there? Sure, it's still in the early version, so some stuff will be hard to work with, but personally, I think it's a really nice hard-fork.
The language is great, but the ecosystem is on life support, and I don't see it getting anywhere close to nix soon. I believe it's especially crippled by being Linux only and forcing free software to the point you're not allowed to even mention the non-free repo in the guix irc.
Random Devs and companies aren't going to use it for their projects, and so there far less maintainers to solve issues like having a node version that's not in maintenance for half a year and 4 major versions behind, or having automated npm package conversions.
Realistically it's currently only useful for a few languages with abysmal PMs, most of which are lisps, and like Haskell.
Now that I think of it, a guix fork would be far more useful than a nix one. You could forgo some of the FOSS extremism, and allow your users to install it without an ethernet cable, and maybe even on the infidel Operating Systems (even though guix is in the official repo for Debian + wsl).
And I bet guile could really use the attention. AFAIK it's mainly developed by one dude, and he made some impressive improvements. Just check out the release speeches on youtube, massive jumps between versions.
Best of all, the GNU people could focus on building a better core, and choose to adopt only some changes, while preserving the purity of their system.
I would be for that fork. I used Guix a long time ago and got really frustrated with non-free and binaries. Guix is really nice to use though and it’s fast.