Re: FAQ draft (Was: Re: Upgrade 0.15 to .16 it doesn't work)

[znavko]

IMHO, this run-around should be replaced with more workable fully ready system configuration files placed to the distro or manual.

"There are already up to a hundred shared operating system declarations
available online for your to copy or get ideas from."

Thank you, Pierre Neidhardt for the link https://guix-hpc.bordeaux.inria.fr/browse

I also offer this:

Whom Guix and GuixSD are intended? - Guix package manager and GuixSD operating system are useful for package developers, programmers and system administrators. Features of Guix are awesome for testing new packages, developing and debugging software in different environments. You can have as many environments, as many versions of any package as you need. Testing and debugging consider to be more efficient and easy with Guix package manager and GuixSD.

What about stability in GuixSD? - Updates is a complex problem for all GNU/Linux distributions. You may have old and stable packages and your system is ok. But even here something might go wrong. For instance, package A may need previous version of package B, while as package C you want to install may need the latest version of B. This collision is extra terrible with such base packages as binutils, glibc and other vital packages. Guix intends to solve this. Guix gives you better flexibility having different versions of any package together. The other case of stability are hardware drivers. GuixSD uses LinuxLibre kernel, Guix repository has only free software. So you need to know which hardware vendors and which products are compatible with free software.

Jan 3, 2019, 10:57 AM by address@hidden:

Thanks for this FAQ. I agree it would be a nice addition to the manual.

I like many of your points. The points I would not put however are those that

are likely to change sooner or later, for instance

* Any stable ones available yet?

* No, not known to us.

Besides, regarding

* Is package X available?

* Maybe! Take a look at the package list of the website or search our git-repo

for the name.

I believe this is an important pointer to new comers (e.g. "I will only consider

switching to GuixSD if X and Y are packaged"), so we need a link here.

The official home page has https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages which is

a rather poor interface in my opinion.

So I would like to the much more convenient

https://guix-hpc.bordeaux.inria.fr/browse instead.

--

Pierre Neidhardt

https://ambrevar.xyz