Bonfire & Guix, a love story -- fishinthecalculator

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨fishinthecalculator@lemmy.ml⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://fishinthecalculator.me/blog/bonfire--guix-a-love-story.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/31718711

Always wanted to selfhost your Fediverse instance but were always worried about system administration trauma?

Do you ever have to run around your flat, picking up all the leftover parentheses from yesterday’s party with your hosting coop coworkers?

Then you are probably the right person, check out this post about fearless Bonfire hosting on a Guix System. You’ll learn that taking care of a community is much more manageable when you let computer do the boring work for you.

Set up HTTPS, automatic backups, automatic nightly upgrades and join the awesome Bonfire community without a single worry on losing data from your instance.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

jim3692@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I quickly went through the article, and I have a question: Why not Docker (or Podman) on NixOS?

NixOS has much larger community (although a bit toxic) and provides native tooling for managing OCI containers through Docker and Podman.

source
- fishinthecalculator@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I find Guix far better on almost every remark, in no particular order:
  
  as you said some part of the Nix community is made of techbros (even if Guix attracts some fossbros as well)
  
  the way governance is structured in the Nix community is brittle, just see the drama from which all the new Nix forks spawned
  
  better documentation. The doc for Nix is scattered, the Guix manual, albeit not perfect, is much more complete
  
  the Guile language is far clearer than Nix, also you don’t have to use it only for package recipes, you can build full applications with it
  
  the Guix story around trustability of binaries is far better (checkout how Guix boostrapps everything), entires classes of vulnerabilities are prevented by design
  
  the Guix UX is far better designed imho, the command line is intuitive and well documented and features are easily composable
  
  the community is not diverging, as is the case for Nix flakes
  
  source
  - jim3692@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I don’t have any experience with guix, so I will not express any opinions towards that.
    
    However, regarding NixOS:
    
    Yes, as a person with experience in the Nix language, I can confirm it’s awful
    
    The documentation of NixOS is a known issue, and there are currently efforts to improve it
    
    Talking about the trustability of binaries, by doing a quick search, I read that Guix builds are reproducible. This is true for NixOS as well. All upstreamed packages must have their version and the hash of the code (or artifact), to allow validation.
    
    The community of NixOS is opting to maintaining flakes, because:
    
    Some applications can simply not be built following the Nix guidelines. Examples are some electron apps (like Falkor) and apps that have weird toolchains (like bubblejail)
    
    The reviewing process takes way too long, and PRs for upstreaming are often ignored. This forces a lot of people to just PR a flake.nix to the application, or maintain their own overlays (overlays are like overriding the available packages, while flakes are more like distributing Nix code in general)
    
    source
    -> View More Comments