libre

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Welcome to libre

A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.

The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.

libretion

Resources

Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in $CURRENT_YEAR, flock to Linux Mint!; Apple Silicon users will want to check out Asahi Linux.

Rules

Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
All site-wide rules still apply

Artwork

Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

I fucking love Guix (hexbear.net)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've had an amazing time with it so far. It's so easy to package for (I haven't contributed a package upstream, but I'm working on it). There's like two places you put your configs (/etc/config.scm and .config/guix) and it all just works. Like, I'm not even an emacs user, I don't really use Lisp much, but it's just such a pleasure to work with. I haven't really had any issues with firmware or anything proprietary (old thinkpads ftw), but nonguix and flatpak exist to fix that.

Really the only issue I have is that some software is behind by a version or two, and some things I use haven't been put in the channel yet (but it seems everything I use regularly is either a patch being worked on or already working).

It took a little bit for it all to click, but after finding the cookbook and looking through others configs, it made a lot of sense.

All that said, I'm a bit too committed to Arch to switch my main machine. Hopefully soon though.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is there an easy way to get non-free software in it? Also have you considered or tried NixOS?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, you can install non-free software, if you really want. I mentioned it in the post, but you can use nonguix or guixrus. They are separate channels, and you just copy like 5 lines into your config (or maybe another few, if you want substitutes). I've tried NixOS as well, but I find scheme to be more pleasant than Nix's DSL (even though I like Haskell). Also, the Guix home-manager equivalent is built-in. It was just a few small things like that, that made me find Guix to be more pleasant overall.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Thanks. I was considering trying Guix/NixOS next time I have to install loonix somewhere. NixOS gets a lot more exposure I feel. There are always people posting about it on hacker news and lobste.rs. But there are a couple things I found weird about it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

NixOS is the older project, that's probably why it gets noticed more.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

NixOS has much more packages, and they are more up to date. Honestly, it is a shame because there are many things about Guix I prefer (especially its license). Also, if you are a developer, it is really nice getting to use nix flakes to set up your development environments.