Hello. Today, I am going to share my experience with installing and using the Guix System.
If you are not familiar with the Guix System, it is a (relatively) new distro with a package manager that is very similar to Nix in that it is functional and has nice features like reproducibility and rollbacks. It is also configured using the Scheme programming language, which is right up my alley.
The first thing to note is that the Guix System is free software and respects your freedom. As such, the base system doesn’t offer any non-free software (which would basically be, ahem, “nonguix”). When installing, you will be offered the option of window/tiling manager. I decided to go with EXWM this time, because why not try it out and go all in on Emacs/Lisp? There were also some steps required to produce a system that fit my needs, but I won’t go into those because, like before, they were admittedly, ahem, “nonguix”.
The first thing I had to do after the install was set up my wifi, so I used the (perhaps very technical) wpa_supplicant to get started. Then, I installed xterm and network-manager (“guix install xterm network-manager”). You may need to reboot your system after this step to get wifi working again. Then, I utilized the easy-to-use nmtui tool to get my wifi working with network-manager. There were then some steps to get the system customized to my liking (which can be found in the pinned article here on my Medium page). I, of course, use Spacemacs, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has a layer for EXWM. Some finagling was necessary to get my other monitor to work with my newly updated Spacemacs config, which included using tools like arandr and xrandr. But once that was done, I was off to the races!
As I mentioned previously, I was not familiar with EXWM, so here are some points of note: If you use the given config (as in, not Spacemacs), you can launch programs using M-&. Spacemacs changes that to s-[SPACE]. There is also a difference between char-mode and line-mode. One of them allows you to resize and kill your X window, although I can never remember which is which. Luckily, you can toggle between these in Spacemacs with s-i.
And that’s it! If there are any additional notes after using these for a few months, I will update this blog post. Either way, I hope this gave you a flavor of what is possible with the Guix System and EXWM. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave me a comment. I try to read all of those when they come in.
Cheers!
