Notices by futurile (futurile@mastodon.social)

@civodul @hako @daviwil @ekaitz_zarraga @dthompson

At Guix Days there was a good conversation about informing users about the situation (e.g. you have hardware that requires firmware), and giving them some direction on how to resolve it.

We actually agreed some actions with @Jlicht and @efraim

We should probably come back to it.

Firmware is different for functionality and security reasons. I personally think Debian struck the right balance.

You might be interested to know how much it costs to run a project like GNU Guix. Well our goal is €15,000 ($17,500) a year of donations to pay for our *current expenses*.

We have all the normal expenses that a Free Software project has for our development infrastructure, hosting and that sort of thing.

There are some unique parts of being a package manager and Linux distribution that make our needs a bit more acute ...

(see pt 2)

#guix #gnu #foss #donations #fundraising

We're fundraising for GNU Guix and looking for donations.

The project is entirely funded by our individual supporters - there's no corporate dollars here - so we need everyone's help

We're looking for donations to sustain and strengthen the project:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/fundraising-campaign-to-sustain-gnu-guix/

And, if you can help by donating:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/donate/

Donations through #FSF or Guix Foundation.

Thanks to everyone who takes part!

#freesoftware #gnu #guix #linux #foss #opensource #foss

Published a new post on regular expressions in Guile Scheme:

https://www.futurile.net/2025/05/09/guile-scheme-regular-expressions-for-guix/

Guix packaging often involves using regex to alter sources. So understanding this is really useful - a deep dive to cover all the parts of Guile's POSIX Extended Regular Expressions implementation.

This is part 1 covering basic literal matching, character sets, POSIX character classes and backslash shortcuts. Two further posts on the way!

Been working on it since May (now Sept) 😅

#guix #guile #regex

Great post "GNU Guix: How to run foreign binaries" by https://fosstodon.org/@zie

https://zie87.github.io/posts/guix-foreign-binaries/

#guix #rpath #nonguix

Voting has started on some important Guix Consensus Documents (GCDs). If you're a #guix contributor you can take part!

It's simple to do so by sending a patch adding yourself to a team (etc/teams). See the GCD document for the details.

If you're an interested participant I encourage you to vote and take part. It will help us build consensus in the project, make better decisions and improve Guix!

This is how #freesoftware works!

#guix social talk this week by @paulbutgold on self-hosting @forgejo using #oci / #docker #containers

His Gocix project brings the power of declarative configuration to running container services.

Details on the Wiki or register at the Meetup:

- https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/GuixSocial

- https://www.meetup.com/guix-social/events/306340848/

@fnat

#guix #nix #linux #containers #docker #oci #scheme #guile #selfhosting #forge #foss

For #guix social I'm going to do a talk for #beginners on trying #guix as a #linux distribution. Basically, how to install Guix System, and getting started.

I'm going to do it in a #kvm #vm as that's an easy way to try the #nix derived #declarative goodness without fully committing.

What do you think the key things are to cover? Any particular sticky areas? Anything that was super interesting when you were getting started? What do #beginners need to know?

Guix online social event - Thursday 27th - come along and chat about all things #linux, #foss, #nix and #scheme associated!

Yeah, that's this Thursday so we can just get our first #guix meet-up of the year into February! What can I say, it's been a busy year!

As usual details are here:

https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/PatchReviewSessions2024

And on the linked meetup page!

@fnat

What's the #1 improvement #guix contributors would like to see?

Timely reviews and actions taken on contributions. It was #1 in every question, with so many comments!

Lots of contributors thinking about ways to automate patch reviews and QA. The theme is removing friction from the Dev Experience.

Both Python and #Nix have approaches to this. What's the approach for Guix? Lots to talk about on this front at #guixdays

More here:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-3/

How do contributors feel about working on #guix ?

Part 3 of the Guix survey is out:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-3/

Timed perfectly ahead of #guixdays and #fosdem discussions!

Number of active contributors to Guix over the last two years - 450!

About 300 contributors took the survey and the project is overwhelmingly #foss #volunteer driven (94%)

I think that's really cool and shows off #FreeSoftware #Guile #Lisp and #Linux

How is #guix used as a #GNU #Linux #distro ?

System level packages are managed through #declarative configuration same as #nixos . User level packages using Guix Home.

Roughly 50% use guix home to manage their #dotfiles - big increase over hosted users.

40% to package their own #software - 36% for #isolated #development.

Lots of requests to deal with #dev dependencies (e.g. Python's requirements.txt) and languages like #rust #golang and #npm

See:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-2/

#Guix survey found that 70% of users deploy it as a graphical #desktop #linux

Be interesting to consider packaging and testing priorities at #guixdays given this figure

About a third are #server deployments, on hardware, but also #vm #kvm - interesting!

The ability to use #guix for #docker or #singularity deployments and #CI were all mentioned. Maybe potential for further development?

#Using #guix in #cloud or #containers with #orchestration (e.g. #k8s ) doesn't seem widespread yet.

Am I the only person that didn't know there's a difference between a hyphen and an em-dash?

In some ways, why? The hyphen is-right-there on my keyboard — but no, I'm not allowed to use it, it has to be a dash — and in pairs only! What-the-fuck!

Is it a native English speaker thing? We never seem to know how the language actually works - also what the hell is an insert key?

Oops I did it again!

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/hyphenanddash/hyphen

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/hyphenanddash/dash

@jaawerth Nice! Yes, I don't recall a specific comment from someone setting that out - people identified "Guile and Scheme are cool" but I guess the benefit of it being a general language rather than a DSL was implicit.

Why are people interested in #guix ?

Declarative configuration (80%) and it's cousin Reproducibility (70%) were top choices which come from the #Nix heritage.

"Scheme, Guile and Lisp are cool" (72%) was second. This seems a different trend - interest in #lisp, #scheme perhaps driven by approaches in langs like #javascript - also some influence from #emacs community

Then came #FSF #GNU and #FOSS interest in Free Software (43%). Then #linux package management!

See:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-1/

About 50% of users adopt #guix as a #gnu #linux distribution. Most in a #linux #desktop config.

That surprised me as it's harder than starting with it as a hosted package manager.

A lot of #linux #developers are interested in #declarative configuration. Feels like people are experimenting with #nix and #guix. Users commonly mentioned #nixos #archlinux #debian and #ubuntu

About 5% initially adopt as a server, and then when they have confidence it goes up to about a third. That's cool!

The #guix survey also showed that our users are knowledgeable #Linux people. Almost 50% are experts/advanced and 47% are intermediate!

A lot of the attraction is the #nix value of declarative configuration and reproducibility. Users also identified that Scheme, Guile and Lisp are cool! Perhaps the overlap of two different communities! That was my path from #clojure and #ubuntu /#debian

See Q1 in the post:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-1/

#scheme #emacs #guile #lisp #declarative #reproducible

#guix is growing and many new users are adopting it!

Almost 75% of the user-base are recent adopters having used it for less than 4 years. 50% less than 2 years!

It's a similar to #Nix who's survey showed 65% of users were 0-2 years.

There's been a surge of interest in the benefits of #declarative and #reproducibility.

And with #guix we also get #lisp and #gnu #freesoftware - but don't worry you don't _have_ to use #emacs to use Guix (said the #vim user)

See:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-1/

The #guix survey's results are out!

Posting things I found interesting!

1. Guix has a fantastically committed community

We've never done a survey before, so I was really worried about how many would take part. Over 900 participants did so!

Even more amazing - 150 people took part who were previous users or contributors! Thank-you for taking the time.

Thanks all!

It means the results are a great sample. Read the posts:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-1/

#scheme #linux #scheme #lisp #gnu #nix