After more than 6 years of hard work and 19 published versions, the Nix team has just announced the release of the first stable version from the package manager. For project maintainers, Guide 1.0 it has several notable benefits.
At the user's level, Guix will make it easy to install the software and keep you updated by using various commands like searching for guix to find the software, guix install to install them, guix pull and guix upgrade to update them regularly.
About Guix
In 2012, a group of hackers from the GNU distributions met in Düsseldorf, Germany, to present a new project on which they started working. This project called Guix, but pronounced "gi: ks" addresses the need to effectively control package deployments across distributions Linux.
In other words, Guix is a purely functional package manager written in Guile Scheme language and based on the Nix package manager. Therefore, Guix finds links with the paradigm of functional programming languages implemented through the Ocaml, Haskell or Scheme languages in this case.
The distribution includes only free components and comes with the GNU Linux-Libre kernel, cleaned of non-free items from binary firmware. GCC 8.3 is used for mounting.
In addition to that it also implements the construction and composition of purely functional packages.
Main novelties of Guix 1.0
Guix follows a model distribution of Rolling Release, which means that you can run the "guix pull" command at any time to get the latest updates.
While this feature is common in other package managers, Guix team adds distinctive Guix feature, which is its transactional aspect.
Conveniently, this means that user can use Guix at any time to revert to a previous version of the package on your Linux distribution running the command "Guix –roll-back" or "guix package -l" to analyze the differences between packages.
As another no less important advantage, Guix maintainers also highlight its reproducibility.
Through this term, we must understand that Guix allows the user to implement the exact same environment modeling on different machines or at different times thanks to "guix describe" and "guix pull".
Finally, it should be noted that all these operations with package manager do not require root permissions for users, which is invaluable, especially in the context of high-performance computing (HPC) and reproducible science.
Guix is also useful for developers because it allows, for example, to create custom software environments.
Also, if they are developers who want to get feedback from their users fairly quickly, Guix provides a simple way to create container images usable by Docker and even standalone archives that anyone can run at any time.
On the other hand, if you are a system administrator, Guix's declarative and unified approach to configuration management should be of interest to you.
To configure their system, they can use a single configuration file to define all aspects of their system configuration, including services, file systems, locales, accounts, and all in the same system language.
According to Guix's team, this greatly facilitates the deployment of complex services, such as applications that depend on web services.
Finally, the team specifies that with a single command, an instance can be created on your machine, in a virtual machine (VM), or in a container for testing. System administrators can also create ISO images.
With this first stable version of Guix, the team in charge of the project announces having reached a very important stage and hopes that this transactional package manager will allow you to customize your system in depth with Guile's programming interfaces.
Download Guix 1.0
Images for installation in USB Flash (243 MB) and used in virtualization systems (474 MB) are available to download.