Re: Please don't leave GNU

[Tomas Volf]

Hi,

responding to just few points.

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> writes:

>> Guix has several drawbacks that, while trivial, make it worse than
>> Fedora Silverblue:
>>
>> * Guix asks for my LUKS password twice
>
> Not sure of the current situation, but this was because GNU GRUB lacked
> support for passing on the unlocked LUKS device with a secure key
> derivation function or some such thing.  The fix should be made
> upstream.

Assuming the cause here is encrypted /boot, than the need to enter
password twice is no more (for over a year).  See documentation for
extra-initrd field of operating-system.

>> * GNU Shepherd is immature and hard to use.
>> * Guix uses more resources (disk space, processing power) than
>>   conventional distros.
>
> Except for guix pull and similar commands, is that really true?  The
> installed software is like in other package managers.

I think this is in general true, at least for the disk space.  Or, to be
more precise, it is an impression I share with the original author.
Compare:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ guix size deluge
[..]
total: 1954.5 MiB
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I decided to use Archlinux for comparison (Alpine seemed unfair ^_^).  I
am not sure how to do `guix size' with pacman, so I just started a
container, installed the deluge package and did `du -sh /'.  So the real
number will be lower (since this one includes a package cache, extra
packages and other random garbage):

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
# du -sh /
[..]
909M    /
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

So, even with the random garbage, Archlinux's package is less then half
of what Guix needs.

Tomas

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.