[ninjin]

I have had NixOS as my daily driver for nearly three years now and maintain a small number of packages in Nixpkgs. From my perspective, macOS support is a headache as it all of the sudden may require you to debug on a proprietary OS that you lack access to and that runs on two different hardware architectures in order to get a patch accepted. I am probably not going to make any friends for saying so, but I would much prefer if Nixpkgs for macOS was maintained separately.

My personal reasons for not going with Guix is that it is a GNU project and thus you have to buy into the entire FSF philosophy. Sadly I do need to run on “problematic” hardware from time to time and would prefer if doing so did not require me to add unofficial extensions and be wary of uttering such heresy in the company of my fellow users. That being said, I like what Guix is doing and their documentation does frankly look better compared to the grass where I am standing.

Lastly, yes, NixOS is a damn curse. Once you get the taste of having a declarative operating system it is really hard to go back. Trying out tiny tweaks to your audio, kernel, etc. all with the confidence that you know how to get back to what you had before is so very addictive. We need more diversity in this space.

[rekado]

> My personal reasons for not going with Guix is that it is a GNU project

That's a high price to pay.

Look, the GNU project means different things to different people.

On of the goals of the GNU project is to give users the tools to liberate themselves from arbitrary restrictions. The Hurd pretty much does away with the concept of an all-powerful root user as the only privileged account to alter settings such as network, file system virtualization, drivers, etc.

Emacs is designed to be a collection of extensions; the Emacs paper makes it a point to show that Emacs brings programming to people who aren't traditionally seen (nor see themselves) as programmers.

Guile was designed to be the extension language for every part of the GNU system that was still constrained by the dead systems programming language C.

Likewise, Guix aims to give “end users” control over their software environments and systems, privileges that used to be reserved for the sysadmin class. All design decisions in Guix are aimed at extending privileges to users: package transformations, package inheritance, building packages from JSON descriptions for those averse to Scheme, per-user channels, time machine, an extensive API to build and export systems, virtual machines, containers, environments, etc.

That's what I feel the GNU project stands for, and that's why I work on it and claim the name despite the PR problems that some GNU contributors keep producing.

> you have to buy into the entire FSF philosophy

Hell no! I don't donate to the FSF, I'm not affiliated with the FSF. The FSF has no say on what happens with Guix (and when I was co-maintainer and rms tried to tell us to remove clang from the package collection we told him we disagree and that was that). Guix abides by the Free System Distribution Guidelines, which were published by the FSF. This means that Guix does not come with proprietary software by default.

Guix makes it trivial to add the nonguix repo (or any other repo for that matter): just add it to your channels and run `guix pull`. Now you've got the vanilla kernel and firmware packages and whatnot. You can chat about it all you like on #nonguix. We just ask to keep discussions of proprietary software out of the main channels. Doing that anyway is not "heresy" (I'm sick and tired of the religious vocabulary being applied to people who work on replacing proprietary software with free software) but just ... rude, I guess.

So, I welcome you to sample that greener grass up close. It might pale a little when you're debugging, but at least you get to use Scheme.

[mst]

During the earliest days of Guix certain relatively voluble community members had a tendency to create an impression that you -did- have to buy into the entire philosophy or you were actively unwelcome as a user.

Things seem to be much more sensible these days but it's worth bearing in mind that a bunch of people who tried to be early adopters will have come away with that impression and plan your evangelism for the current state of the project accordingly.

[ninjin]

First of all, you and all other of my fellow FLOSS developers have my respect. We may disagree on major or minute aspects of software design and philosophy, but ultimately we are a force for good in this world. I also admit that there are – as you say – nuances between GNU projects.

> I'm sick and tired of the religious vocabulary being applied to people who work on replacing proprietary software with free software

Well, I should have used quotes (“heresy”) to highlight the fact that I do not consider the usage to be entirely appropriate. But maybe instead of turning outwards it may be better to turn inwards and ask oneself why people such as myself, that have written less than about 10,000 lines of proprietary code in our entire lives, still draw upon such analogies to describe our GNU brethren?

One may think that following the Free System Distribution Guidelines only leads to the base system not shipping with proprietary nonsense. However, as you point out, there is also the fact that a chunk of the developer base find mentions of proprietary software offensive (?) and this necessitates shielding them with the #guix and #nonguix distinction. Perhaps naively, I find this counterproductive as I would rather have the “sinners” (sorry, I could not resist) on board and empower them to control the proprietary software that plenty of times is forced upon them because they have to make a living in a partially proprietary world. I want to allow them to transition cleanly to what we must ultimately turn into better non-proprietary alternatives. For example, I am happy that I can control and proud to have managed to keep my exceptions down to:

    nixpkgs.config.allowUnfreePredicate = pkg: builtins.elem (lib.getName pkg) [
      # “So Nvidia, fuck you!”
      "cudatoolkit"
      "nvidia-persistenced"
      "nvidia-settings"
      "nvidia-x11"
    ];

Accommodating a user’s ability to do this, in my mind, makes us stronger as we acknowledge a reality where compromises have to be struck. Yes, one could bring out nonguix to accomplish this, but it is very clear from how Guix is structured as a project that these people and the software they rely upon is at the very best a secondary concern to the project’s goal and the software they produce. In summary I want to engage with users of proprietary software rather than to shield myself from them, as I think this is more likely to lead to long-term success of and superior free software.

Note that all of this is regardless of whether you are a card carrying FSF member and my general dislike for the law-based approach that the GPL takes to free us from proprietary software.

[mplanchard]

Oh yeah no doubt MacOS is a huge pain. We use nix for installing system deps at work, and it seems like once every six months or so something will inexplicably stop working on Mac. Luckily I have an old Mac at home, but the new architecture means that one is becoming pretty much useless now for debugging some of the stuff that comes up.

Still, being able to guarantee everyone working on the project has the same versions of everything is pretty nice. No need to worry about ancient Mac versions of bash or awk or sed or whatever, so we can script confidently.

[xyzzy_plugh]

In the long run macOS support will prove valuable for shaking out a ton of cross-platform build issues. I see the macOS support as a huge, compelling and underfunded reason to try nix. The fact that I can avoid homebrew entirely is incredible.

It helps me and my peers flex our Nix muscle regularly, which means when we have to do real Nix work it's fresh in out minds.

Sure, there are rough edges and baggage and purism pain but I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

Frankly I think nix-darwin should be rolled into nixOS.