The Guix System

Guix takes a novel approach to its package management. Mats Tage Axelsson guides you around it.

- By Mats Tage Axelsson

When you first choose your distribution, it comes down to what’s available and what’s easy to use. As you learn more about Linux, you’ll start thinking more about how your choices affect your daily use. For many users, the choice of desktop and styling makes the biggest impression. Yet the real difference between distributions is how you manage packages.

The most common package manager is the Debian dpkg one. Ubuntu uses its own version of it, and only the repositories differ. Also, the way the system installs software is the same. Once you decide to install a software package, it goes to the standard position, all according to the Linux Software Base (LSB).

For Guix developers, this system had too many drawbacks, including dependency hell. In this hell, you have a favourite application that depends on library 1.x. All new applications use 2.0 of said library. In this case, the old application must go, or else all your new applications won’t work. Though this is rare for ordinary users, it’s an issue that plagues developers.

To solve this problem Guix developers, searched high and low but couldn’t find a decent solution to this problem. Until NixOS showed the way. They now had an excellent way to handle this problem, and a few others, but it was not GNU compliant and so the GNU Guix system was born.

Distro breakdown

There are two things that make up a distribution: the package manager, and the selection they offer by default. The package managers maintain the binaries or all source code. The default is to download binary packages and place them according to standard. The exceptions are Gentoo, Arch and a few others that default to compiling software.