I want to love Guix (both the package manager and the distro). I want to love Scheme. But I can never find any good tutorials for Scheme and using it with Guix. The GNU documentation is more of a reference than a tutorial. I use Emacs on the daily, and I just can’t get into Scheme.

Btw, here’s how you install distrobox on Guix.

First, install rootless Podman: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Miscellaneous-Services.html#Rootless-Podman-Service.

You need to edit your /etc/config.scm or where ever you store your system config. Import the right modules/services, add your user to cgroup, add iptables-service-type to your services, add rootless-podman-service-type and configure it.

(use-service-modules containers networking …)
(use-modules (gnu system accounts))  ;for 'subid-range'

(operating-system
  ;; …
  (users (cons (user-account
                (name "alice")
                (comment "Bob's sister")
                (group "users")

                ;; Adding the account to the "cgroup" group
                ;; makes it possible to run podman commands.
                (supplementary-groups '("cgroup" "wheel"
                                        "audio" "video")))
               %base-user-accounts))
  (services
    (append (list (service iptables-service-type)
                  (service rootless-podman-service-type
                           (rootless-podman-configuration
                             (subgids
                               (list (subid-range (name "alice"))))
                             (subuids
                               (list (subid-range (name "alice")))))))
            %base-services)))

Then of course you run guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm.

Now you can do a simple guix install distrobox. If you install distrobox first, you don’t end up using rootless podman and you run into more problems that way. (You have to use distrobox --root.)

After that command, everything should work like normal. Enjoy. 🍻

distrobox create --image docker.io/library/archlinux:latest --name arch-dev
distrobox enter arch-dev

I’ve not used Guix but I don’t think any distro has anything close to number of desirable available packages as arch— so be prepared for that. My ventures into debian, suse and fedora were made quite annoying by having to work around the many missing packages. Including user-facing applications, dependencies and background programs. I never quite got down with distrobox, maybe that’s the cure.

this chart on wikipedia gives the impression that Debian has more packages but that’s not the way it feels when you are looking for something. Maybe they have a lot of dot matrix printer libraries from 1992 or something which bring the number up.

Arch includes a lot of not-at-all-free packages (which it is impossible to distinguish in pacman or other tool as far as I can find), orphaned, new packages that haven’t yet made it into other repos, and packages where no attempt has been made to submit them to other repos.

On arch I have virtually never had to go outside the repos for packages. It’s very hard to give up once you are used to it. (Even though it’s better to use properly libre/free stuff and other benefits of a more curated approach like security, stability and quality.)

I love it especially because of the guix shell and guix shell container for dev environment isolation. It is a whole different ecosystem from the ground up though so it’s not an easy ride. But those two features make it worth it for me. Also it’s GNU distro which imo is a plus.

I use nix for any packages I can’t get from guix repos. So that’s an option too.

Expect a steep learning curve even if you know Linux inside out. Don’t assume things work the way they did on Arch (or most other distros). If your hardware doesn’t work well, or you otherwise need some proprietary stuff, check out https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix. Good luck!