Re: Firefox 52's end of life, packaging Chromium

[Benjamin Slade]

Speaking from a user-perspective, I would be very much in favour of
having modern Firefox and Chromium (appropriately de-Googled as much as
possible, of course) as actual Guix offerings.

And while there are lots of objectionable things about the www in 2018,
I don't think being a GNU follower is likely to strongly correlate with
being anti-web (I suspect the opposite, if anything).

On most of my machines I find what I really need are Emacs, LaTeX, a
terminal, and the latest versions of Firefox and Chromium, as there are
things which simply don't work otherwise (and having used IceCat 52 for
a few weeks now on Guix, I'm also reminded of how horribly slow Firefox
used to be).

I've managed to jury-rig a mostly-working actual Firefox on my GuixSD
machine, but only by installing Docker via Nix and figuring out how to
build and run Firefox in a Docker container (non-trivial task, having
never touched Docker before, and one that still doesn't work
100%). While this has been somewhat educational, I'd have rather spent
the time further exploring Guix (trying to build new Guix packages &c.).

Just my two bits as a user,
  —Ben

--
Dr Benjamin Slade - Uni of Utah - Linguistics [linguistics.utah.edu]
 ( https://slade.jnanam.net . https://babbagefiles.xyz )
  `(pgp_fp: ,(21BA 2AE1 28F6 DF36 110A 0E9C A320 BBE8 2B52 EE19))
    '(sent by mu4e on Emacs running under GNU/Linux . https://gnu.org )
       `(Choose Linux ,(Choose Freedom) . https://linux.com )