I have been using linux for about 2 years now and I have enjoyed every second of it. What in your opinion is the best package manager the linux community has ever offered to us? dpkg, apt, yum, pacman, xbps, zypp, nix, guix, portage, 0install and other tons of them that are out there.

    • marmulak
      1·
      4 years ago

      Guix let me down sort of because of “special” requirements. Basically traditional software development seems to not want to work on it, so for example I needed opam for a project and just couldn’t get it to work. I did make some progress also thanks to a very helpful Guix contributor, but still ended up missing a dependency for my project and had to not use Guix.

      Another terrible thing I experienced with Guix is that if I had a package installed like ungoogled-chromium then updating the system/packages was like Russian roulette of either getting a neat 50mb binary package or if it’s missing (which it was half the time) Guix tries to undertake the task of building it from source which is insane. Maybe there’s a way to make it skip building from source in that case, but instead I had to use “guix weather” to see if I could update using binary packages only and if not then postpone updating.

      • adrianmalacoda
        3·
        4 years ago

        I use a script to parse the output of guix upgrade --dry-run to figure out what packages will need to be built, and prompt me for whether I want to build anything or just upgrade from substitutes (by feeding the list of packages without substitutes to guix package -u --do-not-upgrade package1|package2|etc). It could be easier, though.

        I think this would be definite pain point for users, especially of lower-end devices, e.g. a Pinephone.