From Guix to NixOS

it's a matter of compromise

I really, really like the idea of a declarative model for things - define a state you want an application to be in, and let the system figure out how to get there. It's what drew me to Terraform (my first real exposure to declarative systems) and what eventually lead me to paying particular attention to Guix. NixOS was on my radar, but having been inducted into the land of lisps I didn't particularly like the configuration language.

It was inevitable I would end up with a Guix install, but it didn't last long - the move was motivated by a recent kernel upgrade I had done on my up-until-then very stable Arch install. The hard lockups got irritating to the point I decided to hop distributions, and Guix was the natural choice - I had already been experimenting with it in a virtual machine, and had written a rather complete configuration file as well. But I quickly ran into a big roadblock: graphics drivers. I rather like playing video games on the old Steam, and having an nvidia graphics card means the graphics drivers included in the Linux kernel don't quite cut it. But don't panic! There's a community driven nonguix repository that focuses on packaging nonfree applications, drivers and kernels for Guix systems (my install image was based on it the nonfree kernel). Unfortunately, support for nvidia drivers is spotty - this isn't really the fault of the community, with nvidia being rather disliked in the Linux kernel and community (case in point). No problem though. A few versions behind isn't that big of a deal, since I don't play many new triple-A games anyways. Alas, the troubles arose again when I ran into incompatibilities with GNOME and GDM. While is has been reported to be compatible with an alternative login manager and desktop environment, I was comfortable with GNOME (despite disliking the overall look and feel, it's a comfortable place to be and I'm rather tired of tiling window managers). Having at this point become incredibly frustrated with the edit-reboot-test loop, I decided to instead turn to NixOS, which benefitted from not adhering to free-software-only to a fault. While I do crave the ability to only use free software, at some point I have to make a comprimise to continue enjoying the hobbies and acitvities that I do.

A fresh NixOS install USB in hand, I set about spinning up a new installation on my desktop. The initial install had a few missteps - while my memory is somewhat fuzzy on the cause, my first go lead to a constant boot into systemd emergency mode. Going back to square one seemed to resolve the issue, and I had a happily running NixOS install at the end of the day. So I guess I'm learning Nix! Which is really not the worst thing ever - given the package manager itself can run on more systems (including macOS, making it a likely candidate to replace brew for me), I can't think of any real downsides to having it in my toolbelt. It furthers my goal of having a declarative for systems I use, which is a slow but ambitious end game.

My initial impressions of Nix's DSL versus Guix's Guile (scheme) is that of curiousity. Nix's language comes across as more of a configuration system akin to (and I hesitate to make this comparison, but I'm in the early stages of learning) YAML or TOML, while Guile is (as expected) a very flexible lisp. While I do still invest my time into learning and embracing lisps (especially in emacs), and I really want to return to Guix at some point, I feel the current comprimise I have to take will lead me to never doing so (unless I switched to an AMD GPU and optimized for nonfree operation). So my current path is to stick with NixOS and optimize and share my configurations (you can expect to see them on my dotfiles repository soon-ish).

I hope to write more on this soon!