Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

https://wingolog.org/archives/2024/02/16/guix-on-the-framework-13-amd

by ingve • 2 years ago

247 188 2 years ago

teekert2• 2 years ago

Is this Guix Nix but with a different language? How is it different? So far I only knew Nix, now I see more and more Guix popping up…

bheadmaster3• 2 years ago

It is inspired by Nix, but with a few key differences:

- it is developed under the flag of the GNU Project, so you can expect the same standards of quality of both code and documentation as the rest of the GNU Project

- it uses GNU Guile as the main language of the system instead of Nix, which (allegedly) allows you to extend or modify the behavior of the whole system

- it uses GNU Shepherd as the service manager instead of systemd

All the main goals of the projects are pretty much the same.

goosedragons2• 2 years ago

The other big thing is that being a FSF project they are much more committed to free software than Nix. It's harder to get stuff like Chrome, Steam, Nvidia drivers etc. Not impossible but you're definitely swimming against the current in trying.

teekert2• 2 years ago

So is it like “Nix isn’t free (as in RMS) enough?”

Is it like Devuan to Debian?

Is it like GNU Herd to Linux? (Surely not since it’s Linux ;))

operator-name• 2 years ago

There's also been a greater focus on reproducibility: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

viraptor• 2 years ago

Same... Apart from the extreme view on freedom in guix. Loadable firmware? No. Microcode updates for your CPU? No. Not free enough! There's non-guix and all that, but really... if the main project tells you this is now what they want, you will run into issues one day.

hardwaresofton2• 2 years ago

- it uses GNU Shepherd as the service manager instead of systemd

I wish they didn't do this part. Despite the furor that was around systemd, it's actually quite nice to use day-to-day.

But also, I realize that the FSF has to do what the FSF has to do, glad they're around.

rendaw2• 2 years ago

- All issue tracking and discussion happens on a mailing list/with custom tooling

Also IIRC Shepherd was a simple 1-level service manager like runit. Is that correct? I played around with it for a while and came to the conclusion that it couldn't represent a service graph.

jckahn3• 2 years ago

My kingdom for Wayland fractional scaling that doesn’t make my apps blurry. It makes the feature a complete nonstarter for me.

enriquto3• 2 years ago

Fractional scaling, by definition, will make stuff blurry. Clean bitmap graphics and fractional scaling are incompatible requirements.

Proof: consider a pattern of alternating black and white pixels: 0, 255, 0, 255, 0, 255, etc. This pattern cannot be scaled to a non-integer factor without introducing gray colors (i.e., by blurring-out the pattern). If your app produces this pattern, then fractional scaling will blur your app.

throwaway112052• 2 years ago

Fractional scaling works perfectly well on Xorg Linux and Windows, but looks blurry on Wayland Linux. Maybe it's not micrometer-scale crisp, but I can't see that. Text on Wayland is very visibly blurred.

And it's not just text, but UI controls too. It looks like Wayland just renders the lower integer scale factor and then stretches the resulting bitmap image. That's bullshit.

jackdaniel• 2 years ago

Not everything is a bitmap. Ordinary drawing operations operate on coordinates, so fractional scaling should not lead to any blur (although may miss some pixel-perfect designs).

In other words vectors may be scaled with little precision loss, or they may be scaled naively (render to bitmap and then scale the bitmap).

mahkoh3• 2 years ago

That is not the case on wayland. Wayland applications with support for the fractional scaling protocol can render without any blur at any fractional scale.

This is because the protocol negotiates the size of the underlying buffer. If the client and the compositor agree on the scale, then no scaling of the buffer will happen in the compositor because the client has attached a buffer that is the exact pixel size size of the window on the physical display.

It is up to the client how it implements the case you described. E.g. it could alternate between 1 black and 1 white pixel in the physical buffer or it could sometimes make two adjacent pixels the same color.

Source: I was involved in the design of this protocol and we had example clients that used this exact pattern. Chromium also supports this protocol without any blur.

DiabloD33• 2 years ago

I don't know why this guy is being downvoted, he is correct.

You cannot scale things to non-integer amounts without incurring some damage.

Blurry/fuzzyness, ringing, screen door effect, etc, you cannot avoid these no matter how smart your scaling algorithm is as long as you're upscaling it to something inbetween 100% and 200%. Nyquist-Shannon is a bitch.

Wayland made a decision way back that non-scaling apps can only be integer scaled to avoid this defect. This was the correct decision, objectively. Unfortunately, people still choose to own monitors that have weird resolutions that do not approximate 96dpi after integer scaling.

Thankfully, 200% dpi screens (ex: 3840x2160 in 24", where 24" are normally 1080p) are starting to become the norm, so someday this problem will go away: you will always be scaling at least 200%, making non-integer scaling artifacts a lot less visible.

Also, I think the parent comment that enriquto replied to might be confused and is merely asking for nearest neighbor scaling. This is not part of Wayland (which is just a protocol), and is managed entirely by the WM being used. Given Wayland is trying to enforce integer scaling, WMs allowing choosing nearest neighbor when integer scaling would be preferable in many cases.

binkHN• 2 years ago

I think KDE6, which is just around the corner, is going to be your best bet. That said, some older programs still require xwayland and you will not get too far with these.

jacek• 2 years ago

I use KDE Plasma 5.27 (6 with many improvements is around the corner) on Wayland and fractional scaling is handled very well, nothing is blurry, no hacks required. If KDE recognizes an app that is not Wayland compatible (like most Electron apps), it will just run it in X11 mode (there's a setting for that, enabled by default).

See the screenshot of my settings: https://imgur.com/a/VQHD5vT

jckahn3• 2 years ago

I’ve heard that the situation is better on KDE, but for better or worse I’m a GNOME user. I probably should have specified that!

phkahler• 2 years ago

> My kingdom for Wayland fractional scaling that doesn’t make my apps blurry.

I'm convinced I don't understand this thing. I feel like it's NOT the compositors job to scale the pixels of an application. That might be a good hack for super high resolution screens with applications that don't know how to handle high DPI but it's an inferior solution. Scaling text at the pixel level is going to be inferior to rendering it at higher resolution to start with.

So how does it work? Do we have per-monitor setting for scale factor, and both the DE and the apps need to follow it for idea behavior? And the compositor scaling the apps is a stopgap? Is that it, or is there more to this?

alwayslikethis6• 2 years ago

Let me type down what I learned through many hours of research.

Under a Wayland compositor, there are basically three types of apps.

1. XWayland apps which cannot use Wayland's scaling protocols, but may be able to use Xft.dpi to scale themselves. Examples include Electron apps when not running on Wayland and later versions of Qt5. These will work without blurriness but they cannot support proper multi-dpi support. The Wayland compositor has no way of detecting whether it actually scales. Some compositors (KDE, Hyprland) let you not scale them, but others (GNOME) will make them super blurry because they are rendered at 96 DPI and stretched to the needed scale. GTK3 notably never supported fractional scaling on X11.

2. Wayland apps which supports integer scaling only. Examples include GTK3, GTK4, Qt5 apps, Mozilla Firefox (minus the experimental fractional scaling feature, which is very buggy). When compositor wants to render at a fractional resolution, the app will render at the nearest integer scale, and the compositor will downsample it. These don't look ideal, but aren't super blurry either, and will work properly with multi-dpi monitors.

3. Wayland apps which properly support fractional scaling via wp-fractional-scale-v1. This is a recent addition to the protocol, so not widely supported yet. The only toolkit that supports it is Qt6, but Chromium (incl. recent Electron apps in Wayland mode) also supports it. Some terminal emulators do too. This results in pixel perfect rendering and looks ideal and works properly with multi-dpi monitors.

Downsampling works well on Macs which have high resolution screens such that you mostly use at least 175% scaling. At lower scales such as 125% (e.g. 1080p 13-14 inch laptops) and 150% (e.g. 1440p 14-16 inch devices), the degradation is fairly obvious if you use smaller fonts. This also breaks subpixel rendering (Macs haven't had it for a long time), which is important for making fonts look good on lower DPI screens. In some ways, Wayland scaling is a regression for KDE because Qt5 had proper fractional scaling for some time under X11, which was not implemented in Wayland as the protocol came out after Qt5 lost support.

kevincox• 2 years ago

Apps that natively support fractional scaling will not be scaled by the compositor. (Well unless they span multiple monitors with different scales IIUC.) Scaling is just a fallback for apps that don't support fractional scaling or edge cases like you drag a non-responding app onto a monitor with a different scale.

Yes, you can have a per-monitor scale factor and apps should render at the right scale based on where they are positioned.

pxc3• 2 years ago

If you've got a whole kingdom on offer, you can bite the bullet and buy monitors that all have the same DPI. It's painful, but it's what I've done.

jckahn3• 2 years ago

Not for my Framework 13 laptop. There’s only one screen resolution option. Even when I don’t have it plugged into my 4K external monitor, Wayland’s fractional scaling looks atrocious on Ubuntu 22.04.

k8svet2• 2 years ago

I've never ever noticed blurriness from downscaled integer up-scaled Wayland apps.

Blurriness is almost always due to use of xwayland.

These are completely unrelated technically.

yawpitch• 2 years ago

Privileging principle over praxis is generally a losing strategy.

Unfortunately it’s also Stallman’s — and thus sadly by extension the FSF’s — entire shtick.

pasc18782• 2 years ago

Although if you look at FSFs major projects Emacs and gcc they do run on many OSs including non-free (e.g. Solaris, macOS, Windows, VMS and virtually anything that exists) and other free Unixes.

GUIX is much much more restricted.

rekado11• 2 years ago

If you mean the Microsoft project called "GUIX": sure, it's rather restricted.

Guix, however, goes out of its way to support extensions at different levels of its architecture. Not only can you extend it with channels, local files, and with Guile expressions, you can also rewrite the dependency graph of your environment with package transformations, e.g. to swap out any instance of Tensorflow with a CUDA-tainted variant of Tensorflow from the Guix Science Nonfree channel, recursively.

ergonaught• 2 years ago

"Having and living principles is a losing strategy."

There's a life lesson in asserting that, but the vast majority of people take the wrong one from it.

bayindirh• 2 years ago

Guix install media was not able to configure the network via the Ethernet expansion card nor an external USB-C ethernet adapter that I had; stuck at the DHCP phase. So my initial installation attempt failed.

It's probably because of the hybrid structure of modern devices. Bare minimum hardware is implemented in solid state, to be able to detected by the OS, for the higher level of functionality (read: packet crafting and I/O), you need the firmware.

This "hybridness" varies between device tiers though. Higher end Ethernet adapters generally work well without the firmware, but offloading and acceleration features are not enabled without the firmware. Better Realtek and Intel (IIRC) devices fall into that class, and some server class Broadcoms too.

einpoklum3• 2 years ago

"Free Software Foundation position on firmware ... is that if a device has ... firmware ... in a form that users can’t modify, then the system as a whole is not free software. This is technically correct but doesn’t logically imply that the right strategy for advancing free software is to forbid firmware blobs"

It may not be the convenient thing for novice users, but it is an important strategy to "dogfood" fully-free systems, i.e. obtain them, run them, and make efforts to get them to work as seamlessly as possible. This was done with OS-level-and-up software - for the most part - and we have been reaping great rewards all around from those efforts. If it can be done for the full stack of hardware and software, this will be very beneficial and in some aspects even liberating.

Again, joe user is probably better off with a more pragmatic approach at the moment. But joe user can still choose a FOSS operating system, which a few decades ago was not realistic.

kryptiskt• 2 years ago

Since nearly everybody uses devices that require firmware blobs, the policy has a huge negative impact, it should have a corresponding benefit to motivate its existence. But what can possibly make up repelling all but the hardiest users, who most likely will have to work around it by installing firmware blobs anyway? There are plenty of alternatives that just work. Sure, the users that can run without blobs deserve a reward, so show them a congratulatory message on boot or something.

There is precedent for not taking a hard line. Nearly all GNU software works on Windows, for entirely pragmatic reasons.

davexunit9• 2 years ago

The thing is that the FSF's stance is already a pragmatic approach of sorts but the line is drawn in a strange place that doesn't really help advance the cause. The hard line approach of "all firmware must be free, too" would render basically every computer unusable, even RMS can see that's going too far to be practical. So, they make an abstraction boundary where "free" stops: If the kernel doesn't load the firmware then it's as if the chip is implemented completely in hardware. It's a practical decision because you have to stop somewhere otherwise you can't get anything done. I wish the FSF/GNU-aligned folks would just make a slightly different compromise that makes it a lot easier for people to start using free software distros. Not shipping CPU microcode updates is particularly harmful to users. 10 years ago it was not too hard to run a distro without firmware blobs on a laptop if you were cool with just getting a thinkpad, but modern intel hardware requires a blob for graphics so even that path is closed now. My 2022 thinkpad x1 needs blobs for graphics, wifi, bluetooth, and sound and I tried to find something modern that didn't need them and gave up eventually.

einpoklum3• 2 years ago

Well, it's not like the "line is drawn" in the sense of GNU software not working on such systems. They draw it in what's included in the default repository for guix... so that line does not actually impact many people, and those who are impacted by it can still cross the line pretty easily.

About the CPU microcode updates... why do you believe they are important? I mean, if your system runs arbitrary code off the Internet, or has thousands of people log in and work on it, then sure, but otherwise, I don't know.

trelane2• 2 years ago

Equivalently, what you're saying is that the world got more dependent on secret, proprietary software, and that therefore those who wish to have freer systems should just give up.

Fice2• 2 years ago

They can't distribute firmware blobs simply because FSF and GNU do not in principle participate in distribution of any non-free programs.

Also consider that if a manufacturer can distribute opaque firmware updates to your system, it practically has remote control over it, е.g. Intel can activate a backdoor in specific CPUs when needed by publishing a microcode update.

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

Had a VM GUIX "system" (really I think its more of package manager overlay) for a while (18 months ago) but encountered some problems. The main feature AFAICS is that it maintains the state of the system and packages all very cleanly via it's own nix build system which is like a snapshot of everything.

The sell is that it's very recoverable - in theory you can rebuild from a single file. That's very appealing for VMs that need to be moved about.

Unfortunately I needed a couple of things that were available only through apt. Now, Guix said it was perfectly happy to mix package management, (a bit like mixing pkg and ports in BSD) - but don't do that. It all went horribly wrong with confusion over which binaries were running at any time and when I did try to port it, it broke.

I like lispy things so will give Guix another try one day, but it needs you to fully embrace its philosophy and no half measures.

Cu3PO42• 2 years ago

via its own nix build system

Nix is conceptually extremely similar to Guix, but a different implementation! It uses its own programming language, also called Nix, and has a less strict stance on free software.

ingenieroariel• 2 years ago

Guix uses Nix under the hood (learned this when trying to compile it). Perhaps learning Nix first will let the grandparent be more effective in Guix later.

Filligree3• 2 years ago

Unfortunately I needed a couple of things that were available only through apt.

NixOS has approximately the same advantages, but a many times larger package repository. Take a look at that, it might already have your packages.

rekado11• 2 years ago

I'd like to point out that Guix is closer to ~52,000 packages than the ~29,000, as we maintain a bunch of things in separate channels that nixpkgs includes in its monorepo (e.g. the 20+k CRAN packages). See https://hpc.guix.info/channels and https://hpc.guix.info/channels/non-free for some popular channels used by HPC folks.

Guthur• 2 years ago

But it didn't have lisp :)

0x457• 2 years ago

a bit like mixing pkg and ports in BSD

There is no mixing ports and pkgs in FreeBSD (I assume you mean that one). When you build a port, it builds a package and installs that. You run into big rebuilds/reinstalls when versions mismatch between your ports tree and pkgs repo.

Guix/nix can't be mixed with existing package managers, but can exist on the same machine. You're (most likely) going to have duplicates and different versions of the same thing.

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

Yes my previous is mainly with FreeBSD. Your response highlights my mistake. As a Guix noob (but with decades of apt/yum/rpm/pkg kinda experience) I misunderstood how these things interact, and failing to manage Guix was most definitely my fault.

Don't get me wrong, I love Guix and the philosophy, but my heart cries out for some Grand Unified Manager of Packages (GUMP), something that can track whether things need building from source, or can be brought in as binary from an apt or rpm, or build those packages as intermediate stages. I kinda thought that's what Guix was going to do. Now I see that a unified package manager is probably unreasonable and that we are headed more toward containerised "Snap/flatpck" way of things - which I don't like.

cmrdporcupine2• 2 years ago

I've been intrigued by Guix for a while; mainly because I like the idea of Nix but was very turned off by its language, when I was exposed to it through a job I had.

One thing I liked about Nix was that it was possible to use its packaging and tools without actually using the NixOS. An old employer used this instead of Docker for managing build distribution. Can the Guix stuff be used the same way?

rekado11• 2 years ago

Yes, see `guix pack` with its various backends.

davexunit9• 2 years ago

You can use Guix as a package manager on top of another Linux distro. I used Guix on Ubuntu for several years.

cmrdporcupine2• 2 years ago

Ok I'll give it a try. I like Lispy things.

One thing I liked about nix in this capacity was the "nix-shell" facility, which could be used to create a whole hermetic dev environment with all the right versions of things and all the right environment variables set up, etc. Similar to similar uses of docker but more integrated with the rest of the system -- not as "sealed off" from the rest of the distribution, e.g. I could still use my emacs config inside it, etc.

Slackwise2• 2 years ago

An old employer used this instead of Docker for managing build distribution. Can the Guix stuff be used the same way?

Yes, and, Guix is actually a "meta" package manager that understands other packages like Python PIPs and Node NPM packages, so you can define all of that in one build config file.

tombert2• 2 years ago

Wait, this is a big deal. Will it work with any package manager or only things that it explicitly supports?

One thing that has become a persistent headache for me with Nix is trying to get reproducible builds with Julia, due to the fact that the package manager doesn't have direct integration with Nix, and `nix build` purposefully restricts network access. I'd happily move to Guix if they have an elegant way to deal with this.

Havoc2• 2 years ago

then it is kosher, otherwise it is haram

Big fan of mixing & matching not just on hardware I see

Gormo• 2 years ago

That mixed metaphor popped out to me as well. What if what you're doing is analogous to a glass of wine? It's kosher and haram at the same time!

Kosher is to treif as halal is to haram.

Havoc2• 2 years ago

TIL. Didn’t know trief

slgeorge7• 2 years ago

For those that don't know Guix can be used as:

* a package manager on top of an existing Linux distribution (think apt or rpm)

* a development environment (think Python venv but for any language)

* a VM system (like Docker but declarative)

* a Linux distribution (similar to Nix)

It's a small and friendly community - we recently started an English-speaking online user-group:

  https://www.meetup.com/guix-london/

Next meetup is Monday next week - please come along!

I also did an Intro post to some of the advantages and challenges a couple of years ago:

https://www.futurile.net/2021/09/26/guix-alternative-to-snap...

jcul• 2 years ago

I used to attend a C++ meetup in my previous city, but since have moved.

I sometimes think about setting something up in my new city.

Do you have any advice for getting a meetup off the ground? I guess meetup is still the best thing to use (it was what my old C++ user group used).

slgeorge7• 2 years ago

We're a small group 5-10 people, so it's very informal and friendly. I'm sure Fabio (https://fabionatali.com/) who organised it would have good advice! I'll say that from my perspective the fact that it's also virtual is really great as otherwise I couldn't attend!

graemep3• 2 years ago

"Guix is a rolling release distribution, the versions of each application are updated continuously. The benefit of rolling releases is that enhancements are available immediately"

The last time I looked at Guix a lot of packages were not up to date, and this included security updates for internet facing things (IIRC, one of the major web servers).

slgeorge7• 2 years ago

New packages and updates to packages come into the archive continuously. For example, in roughly the last 24 hours 40 packages were added or updated - https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/ . Advantage of this is that you can use new packages immediately and there's no big 'upgrade'. Challenges are that if you were an enterprise and wanted to stick on an 'old' version this wouldn't the right distribution.

Guix does receive security updates, and those are added to the archive immediately. I haven't had any problems myself. It's definitely a 'community' project, so you have to enjoy doing a bit of hacking!

gigatexal2• 2 years ago

With nix i can install free, non-free apps -- the amount of nix-able stuff is a ton. Is Guix only set to install FSF blessed proprietary free stuff?

rekado11• 2 years ago

No. While the core repository (we call that a "channel") only includes free software, there are no restrictions whatsoever on what you can or cannot install with Guix.

Guix makes it trivial to add third-party channels (such as nonguix, guix-science-nonfree, or other free software channels like guix-cran or guix-science) or extend Guix in an ad-hoc fashion.

You can also build an entirely private collection of packages if you want; from a file, from a git repository, from a Guile expression, etc.

slgeorge7• 2 years ago

No.

Guix is more similar to Debian, with only 'Free Software' applications in the main archive.

For proprietary codecs, firmware and so forth there is the Nonguix channel. Again, this is fairly similar to how distributions like Ubuntu have handled this line in the past.

I need Chrome and also have some games loaded using 'channels' - heh heh - another post:

https://www.futurile.net/2022/12/04/proprietary-apps-on-guix...

A lot of Guix users use Flatpaks.

b5n• 2 years ago

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Channels.html

https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

gigatexal2• 2 years ago

Thanks for addressing my ignorance.

yjftsjthsd-h6• 2 years ago

a Linux distribution (similar to Nix)

I'm pretty sure all of these are like nix, right? I've used nix on top of other distros, the development environment thing is like nix-shell, nix is happy to build container images, and of course there's nixos.

colordrops• 2 years ago

Guix was originally derived from Nix. Guix has different goals.

slgeorge7• 2 years ago

Yes, I wasn't throwing shade on Nix, I was drawing a specific comparison about Linux distributions.

My opinion is that Guix/Nix move the state of the art for Linux distributions forward. So Guix<->Nix are both similar Linux distributions, and different from previous approaches (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc).

Transactional package management and declarative system configuration solve a whole host of problems. Guix (and Nix?) directly integrates configuration management into the OS, rather than as some adjunct piece of tooling (Ansible, Terraform etc). We define the packages, the system, the configuration using the same DSL. Transactions and a declarative approach improve maintainability, reproduciblity and might limit the amount of time I spend messing with different tooling ;-)

matrss• 2 years ago

* a package manager on top of an existing Linux distribution (think apt or rpm)

Just to add to this: don't just think apt or rpm, also think conda/mamba, homebrew or pipx. Nix, and I am sure guix as well, unify this "traditional" distinction between system and user package managers.

SkyMarshal• 2 years ago

* a Linux distribution (similar to Nix)

To nitpick, you mean similar to NixOS. Nix is the package manager, Nix language is the config language that manages the package manager, and NixOS is the operating system created from those two.

danecek912• 2 years ago

Fly

eecc• 2 years ago

   HOWEVER, and I hope this is a transient situation, there is a problem: in GNOME, applications that aren’t native Wayland apps don’t scale nicely. It’s like the app gets rendered to a texture at the original resolution, which then gets scaled up in a blurry way.

Unfortunately that's how it works on all Linux distros since "this will be the year of Wayland". Last time I tried it was 2020, and I gave up when it turned out there were no alternatives to the off-screen rendering and scaling hack for Chrome, IntelliJ and VSCode.

Sorry but my eyesight is already bad as it is.

alwayslikethis6• 2 years ago

This is largely a GNOME issue. KDE and Hyprland supports not scaling XWayland and a lot of X11 apps can scale themselves. VSCode and Chromium scales perfectly in Wayland now and IntelliJ can scale in X11.

zilti• 2 years ago

It simply does not matter, because all DEs are on Wayland now, everything supports it, and honestly, I haven't seen an application not supporting Wayland for quite some time. Even Chrome is Wayland-native now.

Filligree3• 2 years ago

You don't run Discord, I take it...

Meanwhile, it's apparently going to change soon, but Steam games generally use Xwayland.

Decabytes• 2 years ago

I really hope one day the Framework laptop will work with the major Linux Distributions with no asterisks. It will definitely require work on both Framework and the Distro maintainer's part, but it is getting better every month. Hopefully if Framework becomes more successful, they will have more say in the hardware manufacturing process, and they will be able to devote more resources to Linux compatibility. I have no need for a laptop now, but maybe a Framework will be in my future if this happens

acomjean• 2 years ago

I’m not sure they have the resources but shipping with Linux installed would be awesome.

I’m always surprised at the lack of choice hardware with pre installed Linux.

But the framework seems to have a lot of users running Linux so it’s probably a great choice.

nrp• 2 years ago

We focus on making sure that the most popular distros work smoothly. Currently, Ubuntu LTS and Fedora are the two that we provide official support for, since they are the most popular choices for folks who are either new to Linux or aren’t especially interested in tinkering with their OS: https://frame.work/linux

aetherspawn• 2 years ago

Whoops, accidentally downvoted when meaning to upvote. Sorry!

Thank you for focusing on the mainstream distributions. If our company ever transitioned to Linux on laptops (it would be a stretch because of Office365… probably the best we could do is macOS), we would be targeting Fedora.

This is because only the mainstream distros have MDM features.

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

We have a couple of them and were quite happy with the exception of a few minor issues. However the lack of shipping (not beta) firmware updates on a regular schedule has given me pause to recommend framework to others, at least until that gets rectified.

MostlyStable• 2 years ago

What do you consider the current asterisks with how Framework works with the major distros?

natenatenate3• 2 years ago

I manage to run OpenSuse with Cinnamon desktop on my AMD Framework 13, with a dell dock and 2 odd monitors, the scaling sometimes gets stupid, but that's the only annoying thing I have noticed so far. OpenSuse has been more of a learning curve than any hardware issue, mostly due to myself being used to Debian and Manjaro/Arch.

e12e2• 2 years ago

... good compilation speed ...

And earlier:

open /etc/config.scm, add the needed lines as described in the operating-system part of the nonguix README, reconfigure, and reboot. Building Linux takes a little less than an hour on this machine.

This is for a system bootstrap of guix/Linux - not just the kernel and modules, surely?

thelopa• 2 years ago

They needed to compile the kernel because they were using the full kernel. The main package repository (and thus the main binary caches) only include a de-blobbed version of the kernel. To get standard Linux including all the blobs, you need to use the “nonguix” package repository. The nonguix folks do have a binary cache server, but using it during install is slightly annoying. I currently have a guix vm compiling Linux for exactly this reason. Since you likely won’t be installing much else from nonguix during system setup, you only need to compile the kernel and other bloby things you choose to include (e.g. firmware, microcode).

e12e2• 2 years ago

Isn't an hour a long time for a kernel compile?

bsimpson• 2 years ago

Wow, the Free Software people can be insufferable.

From the README on the attached Nonguix escape hatch:

Please do NOT promote this repository on any official Guix communication channels, such as their mailing lists or IRC channel, even in response to support requests! This is to show respect for the Guix project’s strict policy against recommending nonfree software, and to avoid any unnecessary hostility.
This channel does not endorse any non-free application. We believe it is non-ethical, harmful to software development and restricts the users freedom. See the GNU philosophy for a more thorough discussion.

So it's Nix, but on extra-hard mode because of some impractical restrictions outlined by the author?

rekado11• 2 years ago

I'm used to being called "insufferable" for working on free software. Still a bit harsh judgment of people who at the end of the day still produce software that you are free to use for any purpose or ignore, no?

So it's Nix, but on extra-hard mode because of some impractical restrictions outlined by the author?

It's not Nix, and no, there are no impractical restrictions, nor is it hard to extend Guix with a wealth of third-party channels.

See other comments here that attempt to address this and other misconceptions surrounding Guix.

tombert2• 2 years ago

I haven't ever used Guix, but I am a huge fan of NixOS, and my understanding is the Guix is trying for a similar experience. The reason that I've never attempted to really use Guix is because I'm a bit worried that I'd have driver trouble because of the LibreLinux kernel and no non-free stuff in the core repos.

To anyone that has used both Guix and NixOS, how do they compare? Do you feel like Guix is a better experience if you get past the driver problems?

umanwizard• 2 years ago

You can add the nonguix channel to Guix which gives you normal linux kernel, nvidia drivers, etc.

Check out the system-crafters distribution, IIRC it includes nonguix by default.

mmcnl• 2 years ago

HOWEVER, and I hope this is a transient situation, there is a problem: in GNOME, applications that aren’t native Wayland apps don’t scale nicely.

Transient situations are almost permanent in Linux land. This has been a problem for a long time and I don't see a solution coming in the near future. But maybe I'm wrong (I hope so!).

stebalien• 2 years ago

This is an issue with any software that tries to maintain backwards compatibility, not Linux. Windows has:

- Many years worth of different control panels.

- Little consistency with respect to toolkits in general.

- Fractional scaling issues in applications using older toolkits (e.g., open up the policy editor and notice the blurry fonts). Microsoft is actually giving up here and has been experimenting with ML-based scaling for old applications (an approach I expect we'll eventually see in Linux as well).

Apple handles this by breaking compatibility every so often, forcing old software out of the picture.

alwayslikethis6• 2 years ago

I notice that even the blurry scaling on Windows looks better than what we have on Linux. It seems that they have some special algorithm for that. Anyone who knows how it is implemented can chime in here?

Eduard• 2 years ago

Window's backward compatibility is way better though. There are plenty of GNOME extensions and applications that just don't work anymore under modern GNOME Wayland.

Example: all the redshift applications and extensions for lowering the screen brightness.

alwayslikethis6• 2 years ago

The only part that's not going to be available for a while is fractional scaling in GTK and old Qt5 software needs to update to Qt6. Everything else is rather quickly falling in place. GNOME in its stereotypical fashion doesn't seem to want to support fractional scaling and doesn't want to provide QoL features like not making XWayland apps blurry, but that's not a problem with Wayland per se.

M911T2• 2 years ago

actually... https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-XWayland-Frac-Scaling

rowanG0773• 2 years ago

This. naively it seems to be a real straightforward to fix. Just scale to the next integer and then downscale. It won't be as pretty but it will be much better then what we have now. Hell make the scale factor configurable so you can get real smooth graphics.

bandrami• 2 years ago

Linux-libre makes some... odd... choices in deblobbing. The most recent one that bit me was the new rtw driver which includes literal GPL licensed blobs as C files full of binary arrays. Users are absolutely free to modify and reveng these but lin-lib got rid of them because their purpose is opaque. It is, obviously, but that is just poorly documented free software and if we're going to start ripping that out there isn't going to be much at all left.

As it is if you want wifi you have to find an older Atheros (pre ath10k) or older realtek (pre 88XX) device, and these are decidedly thin on the ground; I just spent two days crawling through stacks of laptops at Sim Lim in Singapore before I found one.

jamesbfb2• 2 years ago

My work laptop just rolled over 3 years which means it’s new laptop time. After spending some time convincing the higher ups at work, I have a new Framework 13 coming my way (and not HP whateverbook). I don’t think I’ve been this excited for a bit of hardware in a long time.

Tmpod2• 2 years ago

Unless the device is malfunctioning or otherwise damaged in a meaningful way, I don't see why it would be time for new a laptop, after only 3 years. I bought mine with the prospect of it lasting at least 6 years (and it's going strong 2/3 in already), but I don't plan on replacing it unless it breaks down or prevents me from working on my stuff for other reasons.

Anyway, good choice on the new laptop. My next device will likely be a FrameWork or similar (who knows how the landscape will be then).

rowanG0773• 2 years ago

I haven't ever had a laptop USB ports last more then 3 years. In fact my last laptop, an XPS 13, had failing USB-C ports within 1.5 years. I admit I probably connect an USB device 5-10 times per day.

jamesbfb2• 2 years ago

This is a fair call, and normally I would run my laptop into the ground, but my HP Elite Book has this habit of thinking it’s still charging when it’s not. The only way around this is to let it drain to 0% battery and all would be good for another few weeks. Luckily all I need to do is let PyCharm index a project and it’ll drain to 0% within an hour.

seabrookmx3• 2 years ago

It's the best laptop I've ever owned (I have the 12th gen Intel model). It's fast, has a great keyboard/trackpad with full gesture support (Fedora GNOME), and sleep works reliably! Battery life isn't a huge factor for me, but if it is for you it's worth considering other devices. I get 4hrs tops, though I think 13th gen and AMD models do better.

mise_en_place• 2 years ago

I would use Guix but it just doesn’t seem to be stable nor polished. If you enjoy running on bleeding edge it seems to be the distro for you.

mrh57• 2 years ago

How do you mean?

If you're talking not stable as in it's rolling release, then yes that's true although it isn't unique to Guix.

But if you mean leaves your system vulnerable to breakages, large unwanted changes, system entropy, or inconsistencies, then surely Guix (and Nix) are more stable than virtually every other distro (and maybe even MacOS or Windows)?

I'm also not sure I would say Guix is particularly unpolished compared to other distros. The project is 10 years old at this point, has a very active (albeit not huge) community, and has some of the clearest/most extensive documentation I've read for a distro. Perhaps 5-ish years ago it had some rough edges, but I'd say now they're quite comparable to other mainstream distros.

As someone who has been using Guix as my primary OS for the past ~2 years on a <5 year old laptop (with a proprietary wifi card) for programming, media, web stuff, and light games, I'd say it's a great experience. Not that the learning curve is not large or that community resources couldn't be better, but if you're already using GNU/Linux I don't think it will feel any less stable/polished.

Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

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