it may be worth switching to guix, but i am not a non-free purist.
The upside of Guix’s thoroughness is that every package must be compiled from source, so this means that there are no random blobs or binary bootstraps scattered around like there is in nixpkgs.
that I wish were tractable, otherwise, mostly just due to how huge nixpkgs is.
Nix flake boosters love talking about how “reproducible” they are until you realize their solution to version pinning is to copy the entire package world, which is akin to cutting down a tree with a nuke. This is a well known problem even given the community name “100 pinnings of nixpkgs” and no one wants to shake the hornets nest.
Guix instead maintains its world as a git repository in the system so every user is compelled to have the latest Guix checkout and then use pinnings on packages themselves and not the entire package set.
Definitely recommend trialing Guix as much as you can, I don’t really have any hope in NixOS since the org is so unwilling to break the silence on anything technical or community related. Also they recently obtained an enterprise grant for GitHub so you can see where their priorities and values lie.
I do like the approach that lix and aux are seemingly working towards where there are smaller independent package collections that get linked together somehow. I’m not sure how that would all work, but I do think it’s important to keep build size down to something a few motivated individuals can compile on affordable machines. Without something like trustix you inevitably end up needing a huge centralized build farm and CDN to have a useful binary cache. IMO that’s the main obstacle to making a viable community driven nixos alternative.
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The upside of Guix’s thoroughness is that every package must be compiled from source, so this means that there are no random blobs or binary bootstraps scattered around like there is in nixpkgs.
Nix flake boosters love talking about how “reproducible” they are until you realize their solution to version pinning is to copy the entire package world, which is akin to cutting down a tree with a nuke. This is a well known problem even given the community name “100 pinnings of nixpkgs” and no one wants to shake the hornets nest.
Guix instead maintains its world as a git repository in the system so every user is compelled to have the latest Guix checkout and then use pinnings on packages themselves and not the entire package set.
Definitely recommend trialing Guix as much as you can, I don’t really have any hope in NixOS since the org is so unwilling to break the silence on anything technical or community related. Also they recently obtained an enterprise grant for GitHub so you can see where their priorities and values lie.
I do like the approach that lix and aux are seemingly working towards where there are smaller independent package collections that get linked together somehow. I’m not sure how that would all work, but I do think it’s important to keep build size down to something a few motivated individuals can compile on affordable machines. Without something like trustix you inevitably end up needing a huge centralized build farm and CDN to have a useful binary cache. IMO that’s the main obstacle to making a viable community driven nixos alternative.