I've been a Linux-only¹ user for about ten years now and, like many others, I too embarked on the arduous journey of distro-hopping. I started with Mint and when that felt too slow, I switched to Ubuntu. When Ubuntu felt too handholdy², I switched to Arch, which proved to be my main driver for well over five or so years. And when I couldn't resist the Siren's call, I moved on to Gentoo, thinking surely "harder is better". Which resulted in severe burnout in a few months, so I capitulated and switched to Fedora, which was very stable and honestly an all around excellent system. But once more, my interest was piqued, and (before today's adventure) I finally switched to NixOS.

I've always had a passing interest towards Nix ever since I've first heard about it, but until fairly recently, I always dismissed it as a tool for DevOps guys. The syntax was weird, the need for reproducible environments seemingly irrelevant, and stuff like the oft-recommended Nix Pills seemed anything but newbie-friendly.

So then why would someone like me, who's so adamant about not needing Nix eventually choose to go all-in? I guess it was at first less about Nix being better and just the rest being worse.

Of the two big reasons for the switch, one was that I realized that having per-directory environments for your projects is actually a very handy thing to do when you like to toy around with many technologies. I used to generate my other blog using Jekyll and no matter which distro I used, it was always a pain in the neck to have a good Ruby environment set up. bundler install didn't really want to work without privileges and I wasn't really a fan of unleashing sudo on it, but usually that was the only way I could get things to work.

With Nix, however, it was a matter of just describing a few packages in a shell and boom, Ruby in one folder, no Ruby (and thus no mess) everywhere else. I was hooked! I started adding shell.nix files to all my little projects, hell, I started planning projects by first adding a shell.nix with all the dependencies I would reasonably need.

The other reason, which ultimately cemented that I need to commit, was that I was getting tired of my installed packages slowly drifting out of control. Sure, every package manager has some method of listing what's installed, but these are usually cumbersome and completely ephemeral (in the sense that any listing becomes invalid the moment you change anything).

With NixOS, the equation is flipped on its head: No longer did I query the system to tell me what's installed and what's not, it was now the system that worked based on files that I edit. The difference sounds small on paper, but for me it was an extremely liberating feeling to know that I could edit my system configuration in a versionable, explicit, and centralized way.

Plug your USB in, dd the file onto the drive, reboot, nothing unusual. If you've ever installed a Linux system, it's more of the same.

After selecting the pendrive in my BIOS settings, the monitor began to glow in a deep, radiant blue as the GuixSD logo appeared on my screen… only to suddenly switch to a menacing red: My CPU's integrated GPU is not supported by free firmware. A helpful popup gave me a gentle nudge about picking free hardware next time (buddy, have you seen the PC part prices these days?) and off I went into the installer proper.

The installer itself is refreshingly barebones and I mean this in a positive way. It asks all the necessary questions and provides a nice basic configuration file, all done in a retro Ncurses-based TUI. I was really happy to see that, unlike my last attempt at using GuixSD in the early 2020-s, KDE Plasma is now a first-party choice during installation. I never really vibed too much with GNOME and the other options didn't appeal either, so the choice was obvious.

Now, I'm not sure if I just picked the worst possible time or if the Guix servers were facing unusual load or whatever may have happened, but after such a breeze of a setup, the moment I pressed install, my PC became unusable for the next 2.5 hours. Which is unacceptable for an installation process these days in my opinion. I am lucky enough to live in a household with fiber-optic internet, that merely shrugs at bandwidth of up to a gigabyte per second and yet nearly all packages downloaded with a whopping 50 kilobytes per second, meaning even small-ish 5-10 megabyte packages took long minutes to download.³

A reboot later my issues only got worse.

I was assuming I'd get SDDM after having chosen KDE Plasma, but (what a later, closer read of the manual made me realize is the expected outcome for a default config) it was GDM that loaded in. I entered my name and password, and I was greeted with the familiar Plasma 6 spinner. The first hint that something might be off was that it loaded a bit longer than usual, but I was not going to get mad at waiting 10 seconds instead of 3. After all, I did just wait magnitudes longer to get here.

With practically nothing installed beyond the very basics, I clicked on Konsole, hoping to start prodding around my config and add some of my day to day apps. To my horror, it opened in the top left corner, without a titlebar and without any borders. What's more, no matter what I did, I couldn't move it. It also didn't show up on the menu bar, despite the application launcher still being completely usable. At this point I was fairly exhausted by these antics, but I figured,

Well, it's a brand new release, perhaps this just snuck in. Let's give updating a shot and see if that helps.

So I issued guix pull… The download whizzed by with speed quite unexpected after what I experienced with the installer… Only to crash into the brick wall that's indexing. Okay, whatever, another 10-12 minutes down the drain, at least now I have newest version.

Except I didn't. Because, unlike Nix, the guix executable is not an omnipresent, unique thing that anyone and everyone uses on your PC. Not only does every user have their own instance, if you don't issue a certain set of commands, you won't start using the new version, despite updating it.

To Guix's credit, the CLI does scream at you to update your environment or else you'll keep using the old version, but I still find this system very disorientating compared to Nix. I'm certain experienced Guixheads are long past being tripped up by this sort of stuff and might even struggle to remember that there was a time they had to do these special steps too, but as a new user it felt a bit rough, especially consdering this is GuixSD, i.e. the system whose whole purpose is to be integrate Guix as much as it can.

Back to our issue at hand. I issued sudo -s and guix pull-ed again. Once more 10-12 minutes passed indexing. But at least I could finally call guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm. Interestingly things are much faster this time around, I saw speeds up to 30-50 Mbps. Before long the system was updated to the newest commit and I rebooted with high hopes.

High hopes, that were immediately dashed when Plasma loaded in the same messed up way. At this point I started to suspect this might be an issue with the GPU driver, so I enabled the LXQT desktop environment and rebooted once more. Thankfully that one worked like a charm and I was able to boot up both Emacs (editing Scheme with GNU Nano is a pain I do not wish on anyone) and LibreWolf (Firefox's de-Mozilla-d variant).

Not having found anything too useful in the docs, I decided to make my problem someone else's so I fired up ERC⁴ and connected to Libera.chat's #guix channel. After around half an hour of wait, a user by the name of Rutherther stepped up and offered me some help. We were able to figure it out that Nouveau wasn't able to drive my GPU (an RTX 5070), so his recommendation was that I should try booting with nomodeset. I did, but it sadly didn't help much either.

At this point I was out of ideas. Ideas of solving this using pure-GuixSD, that is. There was still one option I wanted to avoid as long as I could, but alas, it seemed like the only option, that still had a realistic chance of working.

Enter Nonguix, the Mr. Hyde to Guix's Dr. Jekyll, the shady guy who offers you a hit and first time's for free, the… Erm, in a nutshell, it's the repository for non-free applications and drivers packages for GuixSD, basically.

Enabling the repo wasn't exactly difficult. You just paste a short excerpt from the README into your ~/.config/guix/channels.scm and /etc/guix/channels.scm files, guix pull, let it index to its heart's content again, and then you have access to all that is nasty (yet occasionally useful) in the world.

I figured perhaps if Linux-libre and its free firmware couldn't deal with my GPU, then surely Linux proper with its binary blobs could. Hell, for good measure I threw in the NVIDIA transform, which is supposed to automagically translate all dependencies to use the proprietary drivers.

Turns out my eagerness was a mistake. Not only did the process take yet another half an hour (if not more, I stopped counting), upon reboot all I was met with was a kernel panic about the driver not being able to cope with the GPU it found and a massive spew of FSCK logs.

With no better ideas in mind, I took out my pendrive again and burned Nonguix's own pre-built ISO on it using my partner's PC. While it ultimately did get me a working system, this version has three unfortunate hindrances:

1. It was built in 2022, far before Guix's migration to Codeberg, meaning it still attempts to pull content from the unfathomably slow GNU Savannah mirror. I had to manually override my channels.scm to point at the Codeberg repo instead, but with no easy means of finding its "channel introduction", I had to pass in --disable-authentication to Guix when updating my system. A bit scary, but I trust the Codeberg repo.
2. Because of its age, I got a lot of somewhat intimidating errors about hardware not being recognized and other stuff I couldn't even decipher, but ultimately the system booted to the installer without issue.
3. For some reason while the installer itself does include Nonguix stuff, it actually does not include the repo in the resulting channels files, nor the substitution server for the project. The README has a warning about this, but if you happen to miss it, you could accidentally install a non-Nonguix GuixSD (say that three times fast).

None of these were particularly hard to fix, however, and soon enough I was back where I started. That is to say, in a nomodeset X11 session, except this time running i3, as LXQT wasn't an available option on an installer this old. There was certainly a bit of a hacker-ish vibe to messing with code files in an environment like that, but I was honestly much more looking forward to finally having a usable desktop.

Having learned from my hastiness, this time I was smarter. I only enabled the full kernel and firmware blobs, without going anywhere near the NVIDIA transform. I issued another guix system reconfigure and, after having time for another tea session, my update was finally finished.

I rebooted with tentative nervousness and… Success? Huh.

Obviously there is little point in throwing GuixSD on my PC and declaring success. I wanted to be able to at least reproduce the kind of workflow I'm used to using NixOS. For that, I need the following:

• A browser: preferably Firefox,
• An E-mail client: preferably Thunderbird,
• A basic office suite: preferably LibreOffice,
• Dev environments: for Rust, Zig, Scheme, and TypeScript (with the option for more, if possible),
• Emacs: I do almost all my text editing in it these days, falling back to Neovim for quick tasks,
• Discord: for chatting with friends,
• Telegram: for chatting with family,
• Steam: for the very rare occasions I want to game,
• NVIDIA drivers: I prefer to offload day-to-day usage to my CPU's integrated GPU, as it cuts my energy usage in half.

Of these it was obvious that two would be relatively hard and one "outright impossible". The two being Steam and the drivers (as both are non-free and thus not in Guix's default repos) and the "impossible" one being Discord (which not even the non-free repo has packaged). But I was ready to compromise a little bit since I am requesting stuff that's explicitly against Guix's goals.

Let's go through this list in order:

• Browser: So far I'm really enjoying LibreWolf. It feels a lot snappier than Firefox and I'm really baffled how much speed I was apparently missing out on.
• E-mails: I installed Icedove, which is basically just Thunderbird without Mozilla branding. It works as expected.
• Office suite: LibreOffice is available as expected. Not much to say about it. I guess it's interesting that Guix isn't following the usual -stale / -fresh packaging schema, but I don't really mind not having cutting edge versions of an office suite :)
• Dev environments: TODO Write the part about Dev envs
• Emacs: Installed just fine. I had to install emacs-vterm to make Vterm work, but all that took was a very simple process of just adding the library to my home configuration and then referencing it in my Emacs config as per this Reddit post.
• Discord: I decided to just use Discord's browser version, which works just as fine (if not better). It's trading a tiny bit of convenience in return for not having to figure out how to manually add a package for it from some random third-party source.
• Steam: Installed just fine. I tested Portal 2 with the Nouveau driver, it is a little disheartening to see a 15 years old game⁵ lag, but I understand the people's hands are tied when it comes to the free drivers. After I managed to install the proprietary drivers, I was able to play even Portal RTX, which is something I never managed to get to work using NixOS.
• NVIDIA drivers: This time I actually read the docs properly and it didn't take long for me to realize the initial problem that caused my previous install to be unbootable was of course found between the chair and keyboard. This time, after making sure I enabled the open drivers and kernel mode-setting, I crossed my fingers, issued a reconfigure and it works beautifully!

So far Guix feels like "Nix at 75% power," with occasional glimpses where it's so much better.

The stuff you see below are all I managed to write down mid-process. Some of these I threw it into the file from Nano, some from half-broken X11 sessions. Because of this, it's not exactly well-edited, but I hope it might provide a glimpse into my mind at the time.

• The installer is decently simple
  • I appreciate the warning about incompatible hardware
• 2.5 hours at least to install (mirrors throttle connection to 50kbps)
• KDE is simply not working out of the box (titlebars are missing)
  • It seems to also default to X11, when I'm looking for Wayland
• The first guix pull is horrendously slow
• Wayland continues to elude me, seems to be an Nvidia issue
  • IRC recommends nomodeset, doesn't help
• Try enabling Nonguix, system no longer boots
• Try installing using the Nonguix ISO
  • Lots of errors, terribly old release
  • Having to guix pull myself to the present day again
  • Also I'm missing the introduction, so I have to run it using --disable-authentication, not great, but I trust the Codeberg repo
  • At least the download speed seems to have normalized
• It isn't entirely clear when you have to use sudo
• Running i3 on a shitty low-res has a certain vibe to it, but I'd prefer a system working out of the box