Talk at LinuxDay 2026. Playing with Guix on foreign distributions.

2026-09-21T19:30:00Z

Three years after my last public appearance at a local FOSS event, my old friend Marco brought me on board again as a speaker for LinuxDay 2026 in October. While my latest speeches were mostly about the status and governance of the FOSS domain, this time I’ll present something more technical.

Lately, I’m rarely inspired by specific technologies; I generally find them not gripping enough. Still, I see Guix as one of the most innovative concepts among distributions and package management, so I will try to inspire other techies to discover it, starting with other distributions.

Because of my proverbial laziness (kudos to Larry Wall for recognizing it as a virtue), this is a good occasion to bring order to the chaos of my how-tos and notes and emerge with something useful for general use (or at least for my reuse).

Recently, I wrote a couple of posts about Guix, and Steve George also wrote multiple notes about using Guix on foreign distributions, and possibly moving to use Guix as primary distribution, after that.

As explained here, using Guix as your main distribution could be variously challenging, even if, in some aspects, limitations can be bypassed using the new linux-debian kernel to include firmware blobs or the non-guix repository for other issues.

The purpose of the speech is to present the concept of reproducible computing at large, something that is rarely exploited by common users, but is of primary interest to developers. The Guix system is fully transactional and source-based, with an invariant, but multi-profile base system. Also, it is elegant and coherent thanks to the use of a fully functional programming language (i.e., GNU Guile, a Scheme implementation). While understanding Scheme is not a strict requirement for a generic user, using such a language allows a fully declarative distribution implementation homogeneously. Indeed, such an approach is light-years away from traditional distribution tool sets.

The speech will include a demo session to avoid talking in general and instead show Guix as a daily driver within a foreign distribution. I have a few weeks to prepare an interesting session that fully exploits Guix's potential in multiple contexts.

See you in Bari on 24th of October, if you can.

frankie-tales

Talk at LinuxDay 2026. Playing with Guix on foreign distributions.