My experiences with GuixSD

[Jonathan Brielmaier]

Hello Guix,

two weeks ago I got a new desktop computer. I decided to remove the
ubuntu on it and tried to install GuixSD on it. I'm not a
super-linux-crack just an "average" user.

I'll describe my experiences and ask some questions/give some input
(indicated with "=>").

1. I had a hard time during installation on the "live-system" to figure
out how to do the GRUB setup the right way. The error was quite simple:
I only have to write "target /dev/sda" instead of "target /dev/sda1".

=> Beside I'm not very experienced with setting up GRUB, something like
"guix lint" for the system config would be nice :)

2. After booting in the installed GuixSD the fonts were awful and I
didn't get them to a better state.

=> I never saw such "bad rendered" fonts on other Linux distributions.
It would be nice if the default font setup would be more pretty. (could
be connected to 3.)

3. The system was using CPU (llvmpipe or how it's named) as renderer and
not the GPU. I have an AMD Radeon RX 480 card which worked quite well on
Ubuntu with FOSS driver. I added a package which includes the non-free
firmware, but after all I didn't got GPU rendered distro :(

=> I bought an AMD card because of there all-open Linux drivers and I
want to support them in that way (=> Nvidia...). The drivers work well
on other distros. I know they need non-free firmware, I don't like it
but there is no "real" alternative. Having just CPU accelerated graphic
is for me a blocker to _not_ use GuixSD. What can we do to solve or just
to ease that situation?

4. Icecat... I had to restart it like every five minutes because it
doesn't show websites. Yes, I disabled all those add-ons (LibreJS etc.).
It was not usable for me, really not. And without all those FOSS add-ons
on addons.mozilla.org Icecat/Firefox is bad.

=> Could we not just have a Firefox ESR version without DRM, Pocket and
the other closed-source stuff, but _with_ the ability to install add-ons
and stability?

After lots of hours (10-20h) investing in the setup of GuixSD I decided
to install Ubuntu as the system was not "usable" for me :(

Beside those "negative" records I have to say: guix package rocks
(install, environment...)!!!

So for the moment I stay a guix user on foreign distros :P

Cheers
Jonathan

P.S: This week the OpenSUSE repo-servers were down for two days. So I
"replaced" zypper with guix package and it was nice :)