Well I re-installed guix again just now, so that I could test Xfce and MATE. (1) Since I knew that gnome worked just fine, I decided not to include the gnome service in my config. I also decided not to include the enlightenment environment.
tl;dr Xfce worked fine, and MATE failed to launch any applications. The first oddity, was GDM. It worked just smoothly, but the default drop down shows that by default I am going to boot into Gnome. I don't even have the gnome service in the config. That's a bit odd. Xfce worked just fine. It took about 15+ seconds for the desktop background to appear, but it appears to be running smoothly. However, there does not appear to be a browser installed by default. Clicking on the browser icon gives me a pop up message "Choose Preferred Application". The drop down does not list any programs. I manually installed icecat. Perhaps the manual should mention that we have not packaged firefox. Instead we have icecat. Also, I used to have problems with my mouse only moving up and down in guix when I use an apple laptop. This appears to be resolved. Nice work guys! After Icecat was installed, clicking on the browser button allowed me to choose icecat as my default browser, and I was able to browse the internet just fine. I logged out of Xfce. Mate started just fine. I did get a pop-up message "Authenticate". Authentication is needed to run mat-power-backlight-helper. I put in my password, and the dialog went away. I did not seem to be able to launch icecat with the Application menu. The Icecat logo was in the applications menu, but a popup said "Could not launch GNU Icecat Web Browser". The error message is "Failed to execute child process "gio-launch-deskop" (No such file or directory). I also could not launch mate terminal for the same reason. Actually very few applications could launch. I could get the file browser (thunar?) to open, but not much else. Since MATE did not seem to work so well, I logged out. Thanks, Joshua 1. I wish I knew how I could have reconfigured my laptop instead of reinstalling everything. I tried this. chroot /mnt; guix system reconfigure /mnt/etc/config.scm; I got an error that said that guix could not access the build daemon inside the chroot. I wasn't sure how to fix that.
