Re: Message by a novice

[Csepp]

宋文武 <iyzsong@envs.net> writes:

>> sudo apt update
>
> guix package --upgrade
>
>> sudo apt upgrade
>
> guix pull

These are flipped.  apt update is guix pull, apt upgrade is guix
upgrade.
But you also want to periodically run guix system reconfigure to upgrade
the base system, including the kernel.

Also: some people put all their packages in the system config, don't do
that.

Also also: i686 support is not very good on Guix.  I run it on an old
netbook and it's a pretty miserable experience.  I'm sticking with it
only because I want to improve the situation of Guix on low end
machines.
If you want a distro for old limited hardware, I'd recommend Alpine, or
maybe the 32bit Arch fork.  Alpine is especially very stable in my
experience and can run on a potato and also on a big server.
But do try Guix first, maybe it will work on your hardware better than
it worked on mine.
Just keep in mind that currently Guix is:
 * memory intensive, guix pull needs at least around 1GB RAM
 * IO intensive, due to lots of disk reads, noticably slow if you don't
 use an SSD or fast HDD with lots of RAM for cache
 * storage intensive, it doesn't yet do a good job of splitting packages
 like Alpine does, and there are often accidentally referenced
 dependencies that get installed, even though they are not needed, so
 packages can take up quite a lot of space.  The smallest install I
 could manage so far was around 3.5 GB.  Assume that an upgrade increase
 space usage by a factor of at least two, possibly more as packages
 themselves grow.  It usually won't actually need that much extra space
 due to deduplication, but if you haven't upgraded in a while, there
 might be very few common store items between profile generations.  Also
 this leads to it being:
 * network intensive, but this is being worked on as part of GSoC.
 Packages that didn't really change still need to be redownloaded,
 leading to very high bandwidth usage, which is exacerbarated by the
 substitute servers being pretty slow.  The distributed substitutes
 project will hopefully change that.


Still, it's a really cool distro, and I do recommend trying it out, but
as someone who has struggled to use it on old hardware, I thought you
should know the risks.