[MrBingley]

I understand and perhaps admire the GNU project's insistence on being blob-free, but that also means Guix won't run out of the box on 99% of all people's computers. The options are buy (old) hardware that doesn't need blobs (which sometimes isn't even possible), or compile the default kernel to include the binary firmware yourself (which the Guix documentation won't explain for ideological reasons). Both of these will sadly limit the appeal of this distribution to enthusiasts-only, which is unfortunate since Guix probably has the most advanced package manager of any Linux system.

[dorfsmay]

True for workstations, but most services are running on VMs these days. OS shouldn't need blobs to run on VMs.

[big_chungus]

Right, but now you have two separate operating systems to manage which are different at the kernel level (as your host is probably linux, bsd, esxi, etc.) This means you often have to manage twice the amount of tooling, documentation, scripts, etc. and makes it impractical for many cases.

[enriquto]

There's already hundreds of distributions with binary blobs. It is very important that at least a few respect user's freedom. So it's great that Guix exists and that it has a serious stance against secret blobs.

[m463]

I guess it depends on what you're optimizing.

Hard for a user, but simple for distribution or legal.