Notices by Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)

“Time travel without borders”
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/time-travel-without-borders/

On the freshly implemented ability of ‘guix time-machine’ and ‘guix pull’ to download channel files without putting you at risk.

#Guix

I’ve been happily using fj.el on and off for months; I’ve tried emacs-forgejo by Thanos Apollo for the past two days (HT @csantosb) and I find it pretty amazing.

🧵

@SRAZKVT It’s “just” a layer on top of LaTeX, Lout, etc., but maybe give Skribilo a try:
https://nongnu.org/skribilo/

And for music scores, LilyPond, of course. :-)

@janneke

There’s been climate-change deniers; now there’s those who deny the ecological footprint of LLMs.

The backlash was already visible in tech circles with the fact that in recent years environmental considerations are rarely even mentioned in discussions on the pros and cons of LLMs.

The mechanism that makes it so that we no longer need to enter our LUKS passphrase twice is pretty cool:
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Bootloader-Configuration.html#Automatic-LUKS-Master-Key-Passing

#Guix

“[LLMs] could demystify the capabilities of a modern Linux workstation and bring them to a much wider audience.”
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/the-future-of-ai-in-ubuntu/81130

Demystifying by adding an “everything machine” as a black-box on top of a complex system? I’m skeptical.

#SoftwareHeritage, #Nix, and #Guix cited as tools to improve the #reproducibility of research artifacts:
https://cacm.acm.org/news/is-there-a-way-to-solve-the-reproducibility-problem/

@Profpatsch Yeah well, it’s a questionable categorization; I guess their goal is to distinguish between those forbid/allow/boast-about use of LLMs.

I dislike the pointing-fingers aspect of it, but I find the links to policies etc. quite valuable.

@abucci I’m also of the opinion that, even from a purely free software perspective, putting aside the many ethical concerns (environmental and social), integrating those opaque services as part of the development workflow is a problem.

I mean, “we” fought against the use of BitKeeper, and later GitHub, for free software development—among the many things people were critical about. And now all this would go through just fine?

@Profpatsch

Well-documented list of free software projects and their use of genAI:
https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

It’s already a long list that shows what looks like uncritical adoption, both by high-profile projects (systemd, VLC, etc.) and by niche projects (GNU Mach is a prime example).

@cwebber The EmDash thing, a sort of reimplementation of WordPress “under the more permissive MIT license”, doesn’t look like a joke:
https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash

📢 Hear, hear! #Guile birds of a feather session online on Monday, April 6th, 1PM UTC!
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2026-04/msg00002.html

Kudos to Olivier Dion for this great initiative—and for all the energy put into Guile!

@cwebber It’s tiring and it leads to an erosion of trust whose consequences are hard to anticipate.

When cross-compiling, Waf *requires* QEMU at configure time to do things like computing sizeof(xyz). 🤦
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Waf#cross-compiling

What editor do you use for your #Guix and #Guile code?

Help us improve the manual’s section on editor setup 👇
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/The-Perfect-Setup.html

I’m particularly curious about the state of free editors one is likely to stumble upon when getting started with GNOME (gedit), KDE (kdevelop?), and other “mainstream” desktop environments.

Thread inspired by the neat talk @tsyesika gave at FOSDEM:
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/EKEFUU-guileoutsideofemacs/

(I’d have included VSCode in this section but realized it has non-free parts that appear to be difficult to tear apart?)

Just looked at an issue in Codeberg that happened to be a duplicate of a bug filed 14y earlier on Debbugs, which itself was a duplicate of an older bug filed on Savannah. (You can tell it’s a critical bug.)

@cwebber Amazingly insightful post!

There’s a lot to learn from it as a Guix developer; we should really have a UX/DX team that could turn high-quality reports like this into concrete milestones.

… which is short-sighted and loses track of the whole user empowerment goal that free software is supposedly about.

But the “economic” incentives are here.