r/GUIX • u/copingbear • 20d ago

Guix System on an (M1) MacBook Air

I have an old MacBook Air that I’d like to move from macOS to Guix System for daily use, which mostly involves Emacs, the terminal, and a web browser.

Does anyone have experience starting with the core Asahi bits and bootstrapping Guix on top of them (presumably with some non-free firmware/drivers where necessary)? Could you point me towards a tutorial or documentation for getting the AArch64 version of Guix System working on this potentially problematic hardware?

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u/thqloz 20d ago

There is a channel to help with the hardware support: https://codeberg.org/asahi-guix/channel.

IIRC, the setup is less straightforward than Nixos, you’d need to setup first the smallest possible asahi official distribution (setup bootstrap), and a bigger blank UEFI only (the future guix system).

There is a couple of setup guides online.

I wanted to do it, for a work daily driver, but I think the aarch64 package ecosystem at that time was quite small, and almost guarantee to have no substitutes, which means building / compiling most of the system, which is not an issue for recreational use, but less than ideal for a professional environment.

I will re-assess the situation and try again if it is more favourable

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u/copingbear 20d ago

Thank you. I will try to follow this trail.

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u/No-Bid-4664 20d ago

I don't have any experience with using Asahi and Guix together, but I use a simple USB WiFi based on a complaint chip. It costs around $10. Once you have installed guix, you can add the nonguix channel and pull the proprietary firmware and use the laptop based WiFi chipset going forward.

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u/copingbear 20d ago

Thank you. Does that mean with just this one piece of hardware, I can get Guix to work directly on the machine?

I assumed the Asahi folks had done a ton of reverse engineering that was necessary to get anything working, which is why I mentioned Asahi.

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u/No-Bid-4664 18d ago

With this one piece of hardware, you should be able to get WiFi working on the laptop using the standard install software. The standard install software does not include the non proprietary firmware needed for more modern WiFi chips so you need to install with an Ethernet cable. But with this device, you can install using the open source firmware.

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u/copingbear 18d ago

Thank you. My question is, whether WiFi is the only blockade to getting Guix working on this hardware. I imagined it’s a lot more.