Hi Leo (Prikler), On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 01:52:12AM +0200, Leo Prikler wrote: > I don't know enough about marketing to give you a good answer on that, > but when it comes to what we're competing against, it seems to be a > rather uphill battle outside of the small bubble, that we've carved > out. According to distrowatch we're still far away from Nix and back > when I was using Gentoo I thought that was some super niche distro.
As Guix is now also a Debian package I think it is doing extremely well. I know people who are silently introducing Guix :). As a full distro it may be niche, but it is also very successful because it keeps growing and growing. Nix has a 10 years head start (I was there) and does better in industry, but it does not mean it wil be ahead in another 10 years. Look where Linux came from. > Guix may perhaps not be the smallest package manager (to be honest, I > have no way of telling as it's the only one I'm involved in), but I can > definitely say, that it does things well, so your point about violating > Unix philosophy is invalidated :P Guix abides by the Unix philosophy in many ways. All the tools (or their invocations) do the minimum. It is actually an interesting mixture of composition and isolation. Guix has the advantage of learning from other attempts. But think about the Guix choice of shepherd over systemd: systemd is not a tool in the spirit of Unix (in my opinion) because it tries to think for you and can be unpredictable :). Guix' focus is on being predictable and hackable - i.e., very Unix spirited. > Also, Guix does not yet write email for you, we still have to offload > that to git. Ah, yes. I would like that feature. > Which ties back to point 2. Guix aims to be inclusive and being > inclusive means toning down the rudeness. That is true. Though rudeness can also serve a purpose (Linus comes to mind though he is trying to tone down the last years) and some people can't help it. We walk a fine line here when we tell people to be less rude and lose some value if we can not be honest. There is a cultural angle for sure. The Fins, Dutch, Russians and Germans can be honest in their language, but that appears as rude in English. Common English can be extremely rude in Japanese. I think, in an intercultural sense, we ought to strive for not taking everything at face value, and try reading beyond the surface. Some people are in the autistic spectrum, do we shut them down and have them not participate? I don't think that is particularly inclusive either. Even so, if someone crosses a line with intent to hurt we should have policies that protect the attacked. That is civil. But I'd argue against judging people by popular opinion. Courts of law are there to judge badness. Likewise, projects have policies and a code of conduct. We should abide by those (the alternative being that people can decide not to participate with the project). It is very hard, perhaps impossible, to defend yourself against (perceived) popular opinion. Character assassination on the internet is all to common now. What we should aim for is trying to keep discussion technical in a technical project, even is it is in reality also a social experiment - as all of free software is and even humanity as a whole. The good news is that almost all our discussions and choices can be technical. > - I don't think anyone has ever been offended by trees – it's usually > the other way round – but there are (some reasonable and some less > reasonable) arguments to support one's fear of spiders, both physical > and digital. We had a cat that got stuck in a tree once. Since that time he looked up and we could virtually see him think: trees are evil. He never went up again. Trees can be perceived as evil even if they are obviously benefitial. Being inclusive actually implies celebrating our differences. Pj.
