GNU Guix For Linux

GNU Guix is an open source and freely distributed software project that has been designed from the ground up to implement a universal package manager for GNU/Linux systems, allowing anyone to install, update and remove software from their computers.

It is also a standalone distribution of Linux that can be deployed to a USB flash drive, so you can boot it and install it on your computer. The package management functionality of GNU Guix is a derived from the innovative Nix package manager and uses Guile.

The application comes with several features, among which we can mention support for transactional upgrades, support for rollbacks, per-user profiles, unprivileged package management, as well as garbage collection.

It provides users with a unique tool for managing the configuration files of their GNU/Linux operating systems. Being based on the Nix project, the software borrows its low-level mechanisms and combines it with Guile Scheme programming interfaces.

The standalone GNU Guix distribution is distributed as a tar archive, which must be written on a USB flash drive of 1GB or higher capacity, supporting both i686 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) machines. The system can also be deployed on top of an existing GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el.

However, please note that it’s in heavy development and it doesn’t yet feature a graphical installer or desktop environment. Users must install the operating system from the command-line. It also doesn’t offer support for LVM (Logical Volume Manager), nor out-of-the-box support for system services. However, it comes with over 1,000 packages.