Maxim Cournoyer writes:
> cookbook. I have fellow coworkers (not at Savoir-faire Linux, mind you > :-)) who have yet to escape their Windows jail; giving them a taste of > what is possible out there with Guix would probably be a real eye > opener. At the minimum it would present Guix as a technically viable > alternative to Docker & friends in these circles. > I totally agree with this - at the moment setting on WSL2 (AFAIK) you have 2 options: 1. Run it on-top of Ubuntu and tweak the various daemons to start on image boot. 2. Use Busybox to bootstrap a bare-metal install of Guix without a host Linux. The main problem I've had with 1 is that the resulting image is produced is very large and does not reliably install on colleague's machines. That and Ubuntu of course is just a distraction when trying to showcase a Guix workflow. The problem with 2 is that last time I tried (about a year ago), this requires you to construct your Guix image for scratch - which is an interesting exercise but will put off the majority of users: https://gist.github.com/giuliano108/49ec5bd0a9339db98535bc793ceb5ab4 What we need is a WSL2 image like other OSs provided which can just be import directly into WSL2 in a push-button fashion. I don't think this would be particularly difficult to do, and would encourage more people to try Guix. It would also be useful for people who already use Guix, but have no option but to use Windows in some circumstances - WSL2 is already very popular to escape Windows into Linux in day-to-day workflows, when you are unable to have a Linux desktop, and has become widely adopted even in companies that have a Windows-only desktop policy. Having Guix images to download and install for WSL2 would make it very easy to showcase Guix without asking people to risk a physical install (which can be tricky to get hardware working), or even to adopt the full Graphical Desktop. Users don't need admin rights to install a WSL2 image, and assuming WSL2 is already enabled (for Ubuntu or whatever) it is trivial to add any other image. It would be nice complement to the QCOW images already available for QEMU. Getting ahead of myself :-) I also think providing cloud images in formats like Amazon's AMI would encourage people to spin-up Guix and give it whirl. And even looking at Ubuntu's "multipass" to easily bring Ubuntu to Windows/Mac/Linux is another way to make it easy to try Ubuntu on any other OS with a lightweight install.
