Posts Tagged: distributions

I recently learned about an opinionated flavor of the Arch distribution called Omarchy, which is basically a collection of desktop packages built on top of a rolling Arch distribution. Nothing special, but for the vocal original author of the scripting job at the base of such flavor, who is, as it happens, for many old-school self-centered geeks out there, the quite discussed DHH. I will not enter into the merits of the reasons for the dubious fame of David "DHH" Heinemeier Hansson, which basically stem from some of his past posts on X/Twitter and some of his questionable ideas.

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture for the Spatial Ecology course to introduce a handful of junior and not-so-junior researchers from various domains to the not-so-nice world of scientific computing environments.

A few days before today, 21 years ago, I sent this message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list to solicit helpers in packaging and to oversee the geospatial software stack included in the main Debian archive. After so many years, still there.

Please, forgive the silly joke in the title of this semi-serious post, but lately I have been thinking about the strange fate of an area of general computing that I have spent more and more time in recently, as in the near and far past. For my job, I have utilized a series of scientific HPC clusters worldwide to solve multiple computing problems most efficiently by distributing computation across numerous nodes. Over the last thirty years, all such platforms have consistently shared the same common characteristics, which invariably pose a problem in their use for the average scientist (often a young/junior dedicated to a short-term project) in any application domain.

In the last few months, I have installed and upgraded my second preferred GNU/Linux system, GNU Guix, on multiple boxes. Regarding that system, I have already written a few introductory posts in the recent past. This is an update about my experiences as a user and developer. I still think Guix is a giant step forward in packaging and management, in comparison with Debian and other distributions, for elegance and inner coherence.

Let's give a second look at Guix-the-system the main GNU Project distribution I dealt with in a previous post. This post is not specifically limited to the distribution, it is also of interest when using Guix in a foreign distribution, even if some configuration details change.

In the last few days, I got familiar with Guix, which is both a modern package management system and the main GNU Project distribution for Linux and Hurd (the Guix system). As a package management system, it can be installed on most foreign distributions, including Debian and any other, as an alternative/additional packaging system.

In principle and the traditional vision, the roles were clear enough. Upstream developers had to create and support their own projects, including multiple libraries, tools and modules, possibly for multiple operating systems. Distribution maintainers had the responsibility of collecting a significant software set, porting on various architectures, choosing versions that work well together for each piece of software, patching for coherence and well-established policies, eventually providing a build and installation system for the end users. At the end of the day, a quite complicated and articulated work that many people out there do for fun, others as a full-time job.