GNU Guix Continues Advancing As A Package Manager & Linux DIstribution

GNU Guix continues to be one of the most interesting new package management initiatives going on in the past few years. Guix also continues evolving into its own Linux distribution filled with GNU software.

Ludovic Courtès, the maintainer of GNU Guix and co-maintainer of GNU Guile, presented at FOSDEM last weekend about the progress being made on Guix. Ludovic refers to Guix as "The Emacs of Distros" and that Guix attempts to empower its users in a similar manner to Emacs. GNU Guix became an installable operating system just last year and in the months since it's picked up an ARMv7 port, many bug fixes, and as of a few days ago became FSDG-compliant. FSDG is short for the Free System Distribution Guidelines as established by the Free Software Foundation.

Guix is considered to be a full-featured package manager and currently consists of 1,200 packages for four platforms. Among the packages being worked on for adding to Guix are IcedTea, LibreOffice, and the KDE components. Separately, a GNU/Hurd port for Guix is also on the table. There's also a web UI coming to Guix in the future.

Prior to Guix 1.0 the plan is to provide more OS features, more service definitions, an improved guix system reconfigure, authenticated guix pull, new user interfaces, a more robust build farm, more packages, and other improvements.

Those wishing to learn more about this fresh status update to GNU Guix can find the PDF slides from FOSDEM 2015. If you're only hearing of Guix for the first time, learn more at the GNU.org project site.