Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to the project or to the people working on it.
Some links in case anyone’s interested to check it out for themselves:
In case anyone's wondering where my interest is coming from...
Long story short: after trying out NixOS within a VM and being positively surprised by how smooth-sailing it has been (so far), I got pretty much carried away by my (over)confidence to explore even deeper waters. After crawling out of the umpteenth rabbit hole, I concede to have been most intrigued by rde.
Basically, if my understanding is correct, rde is an attempt to bridge the gap between Guix System and NixOS. For example: Guix Home, which is basically Guix’ home-manager, originated from rde.
Furthermore, I find it particularly noteworthy how it’s stateless by default. Which, IIUC, is absolutely not trivially done on Guix System. Simply, because Guix System doesn’t have something akin to the impermanence module found on NixOS.
I’m sure there’s a lot more I could delve into, but I’ll keep it at that for the sake of brevity.
Could someone please tell us what the added value is?
Havent used it but from what I see it looks like a configured guix setup, like how fedora atomic desktop is to ublue
It is just another Guix channel, like nonguix. People tend to forget about how easy it is to extend Guix.
I’m literally a newb to Guix, so please forgive me for my ignorance.
But while using (parts of) rde by regarding it as a channel is found within its documentation, I don’t think it’s the full picture. Like, rde is also a distro, at least by the admission of its creator. The same can not be said about nonguix. So, to be frank, I don’t think it’s just another Guix channel.
Having said that, I am still very new to all of this. So, if I’m incorrect and/or my understanding is lacking, then please feel free to correct/educate me on this.
Think of Guix like a pile of mud that you can mold and shape it to have nearly any properties that you want.
Those molding steps that create RDE do create an operating system but at its core, it is just a shaping of that pile of mud.
In such if we define an operating system in those terms, then every Guix user has created their own distro as well.
Also if you look at the history, guix home was first developed in RDE, and then upstreamed to Guix. So the two projects are very close.
Hi, how it works is that RDE is like a big guix configuration. So it makes like a superset of Guix System.
So it can be considered a distro based on Guix if you want, although its just Guix with a channel on the technical side.
