Trying Guix: A Nixer's Impressions
57 points by bhoot
57 points by bhoot
On this laptop, a guix pull (remember, this is the equivalent to updating your nixpkgs pin on Nix) can easily take 30-50 minutes.
This seems pretty bad, borders on unusable.
I wonder if the author pulled from Savannah? I was playing with Guix in a VM a few days ago, and noticed that a huge contributor to guix pull was where it pulled from. Switching from Savannah to Codeberg sped it up a lot. It was still incredibly slow compared to Nix (which isn’t particularly fast itself, either), but a guix pull took about 20-25 minutes in a 2 CPU, 8GiB RAM VM, almost half of that 30-50, and my VM was probably less powerful than the author’s laptop.
I can corroborate this. Guix went through a lot of churn in the last two months during its migration to Codeberg. If the author had set up their Guix system during this churn, and/or used the old savannah channels, then that’s one reason why it took so much time. The new codeberg channels are much faster.
Having said that, yes, Nix is much faster than Guix.
I experienced this too, sadly. I want to like Guix, but didn’t want to sign up for these sorts of performance issues.
I wish Guix could work with systemd too, as with shepherd there is this grave problem which results in filesystems not cleanly unmounted before reboot/shutdown.
This is super interesting and something I’ve thought about as a nix user who likes lisp/scheme.
I got a bit distracted by the mention of the “unchartevice laptop”. I’ve never heard of this manufacturer or the cpu it’s running. A quick search doesn’t reveal any info in English. Anybody have any details on this hardware or the desktop simulator linked there?
I tried to read linked articles about systemd issues, but these are either dead or have invalid TLS certificates.