Re: Leaving the guix project

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello David,

Thanks for providing feedback.

You make it sound like GuixSD is unusable on real hardware due to the
lack of proprietary firmware, but reality is different.  I think this
section I wrote a while back pretty accurately reflects the situation:

  https://gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Hardware-Considerations.html

On many laptops WiFi doesn’t work out of the box because they come with
Intel WiFi chips and Intel denies its customers the 4 freedoms,
security, and privacy.  Lack of WiFi is an important issue of course,
but it’s easily worked around and it’s pretty much the only issue.

Perhaps you take hardware support in GNU/Linux for granted.  When I
started using GNU/Linux, things like sound support or graphics mode
support or webcams would often be missing—things were a lot more
difficult in practice.  It’s the dedicated work of volunteers that
brought us drivers for all this.

I don’t feel any pressure to give in proprietary software for the extra
1% convenience it’d bring me.

Now, as others pointed out, GuixSD doesn’t prevent you from running the
software you want.  As you know, GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH serves this purpose:
you can easily extend the distro and tweak it to your needs.

One last thing: please don’t describe political struggles as “religion.”
It’s unnecessarily offensive, especially when talking to an atheist.

Happy hacking, and consider using ‘guix environment’ to ease your new
hacking life!  :-)

Ludo’.