On Sun, 10 Apr 2022 10:01:59 +0000 Gottfried <[email protected]> wrote:
> Do I have to do a "sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm" > always after the "guix package -u"? > Can I do it every month or every second month? when I don't need the > latest version of packages? > > Gottfried > > > > I solve the latter by having a very lean system profile, only the > > bare essentials are installed for the whole system, things like the > > window manager are only in my user profile. [email protected] > > How did you do that? to create a "very lean system profile"? > I am not a hacker but a normal Linux user right now. > > Gottfried > > Don't add big packages like gnome to the operating-system's packages field. If you based your system on the desktop template, then it's probably a part of it. That's pretty much it, really. GNOME was the biggest problem for me. Sometimes GDM would cause issues too, so I got rid of that as well. This might be overkill for your use case. I can't really write a proper tutorial right now, so here are some starting points: * the `filter` function in Guile Scheme * combine with service-kind to remove services you don't need * the %desktop-services definition in the Guix source code, or just eval it from a Guile REPL and see what's in it In general, don't put anything in the `packages` field, unless you need it for system rescue and administration. So, putting rsync there is fine, you might need it for restoring from a backup. But GNOME is not fine, it has a lot of dependencies that you probably won't even use and any one of them could slow down or break your system build. Caveat emptor: it might not be possible to use GNOME with a display manager (like GDM, it's the graphical thingy you log in with) unless it's installed in your system profile. You might have to launch it manually with something like `dbus-run-session gnome`, this is also how you would launch Sway.
