GNU Guix

Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2015–2024), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with GNU Guix, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 24 complaints

Guix pull is very slow to run2024-08-10
Packages disappear over time, making older versions inconvenient to get2023-05-31
Non-free packages are hard to install; defaults and documentation omit them2022-09-22
Installer wiped partition table without prompting during manual partitioning2022-09-21
Introductory documentation is rough; hard to set up own packages2022-07-18
Configuration and packaging seem complicated for non-programmers2022-05-27
Struggles to import modules after installing Python via Guix2022-02-27
Couldn't figure out how to configure the bootable VM image; docs only cover the installer2022-01-25
Documentation is gigantic and hard to find what you need in2022-01-24
Error messages are unhelpful and don't point to the actual problem line2021-11-20
Error messages are unreadable, buried under deep Scheme macro expansion layers2021-11-20
Couldn't figure out how to debug Scheme errors after breaking config2021-11-20
CLI installer lacks GUI, making disk layout and first boot harder to manage2021-05-12
Installer hard-bails on existing installs, so it cannot be scripted2020-11-24
Rerunning the installer reinstalls everything slowly instead of skipping existing setup2020-11-24
Upgrading packages is very slow, taking hours when no substitute is available2020-11-23
Often misses packages or gets errors importing from other repositories, needing mailing list help2020-11-23
Installation repeatedly fails because critical drivers are missing on common hardware2020-02-11
Compiling from scratch takes days, and guix pull takes hours and repeated restarts2019-10-21
Vague referrals to obscure channels; searching turned up none, so the user couldn't get proprietary software working2019-05-03
Error message for unmatched parentheses is hard to read and locate, even for experienced users2019-01-19
Packaged Java can't make https requests, so the first task failed2017-05-23
Customizing builds is hard; configuration must be patched into recipes on every update2015-03-02
Hard to configure how packages are built and maintain custom options2015-03-02