Häagen-Dazs

“Häagen-Dazs” is an invented pseudo-Scandinavian phrase coined by the American Reuben Mattus, in a quest for a brand name that he claimed was Danish-sounding. However, the company’s pronunciation of the name ignores the letters “ä” and “s”, and letters like “ä” or digraphs like “zs” do not exist in Danish.

His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the 1996 PBS documentary An Ice Cream Show that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked.

Where is that from? It is extremely pessimistic and obviously false.

wait until you try emacs

That sounds roughly correct, though I don’t see the connection with the article? Unless you’re saying that “products” (like Signal) will always exist, which is probably true but is orthogonal to whether or not other models will succeed.

As for email, I think posteo does a pretty good job, but you’re right options are few and far between. But self hosting email is just as viable as ever? Perhaps less so since e.g. gmail will instantly flag your incoming mail as spam if you’re sending it from randomsite.tld, but honestly that issue hasn’t gotten that bad (yet). Yes, whenever there’s a protocol like email or xmpp, companies will create gmails and signals and turn them into walled gardens, but that doesn’t spoil the protocol for everyone else. It just causes frustration that companies build closed products on top of open technologies, but not much to be done about that.

I have never used nix or nixos. I liked their shared idea (functional, atomic, reproducible systems), and so when I looked at their differences they seemed to all be pros for guix:

1. Clearer, more robust, more centralized documentation
2. GNU Project
3. Guile Scheme (Lisp) as opposed to Nix DSL
4. Unparalleled emacs integration

The only bittersweet aspect of guix compared to nix was the foss only stuff, as I do need some proprietary drivers, but nonguix is so easy it hasn’t been a practical issue. And of course I am big advocate of free software so I like that guix is pushing that forward.

There’s also a theoretical issue that guix has less packages, but the standard channel + nonguix has had everyhing I use.

Alternatively if price is an issue (NEVER use a “free” VPN) you could torrent over I2P, which is free and very safe (at least as safe as tor, if not moreso).

Also the next release of qbittorrent is about to have built in I2P support (but also standard I2P comes with its own torrenting software).

Glad to hear it! Feel free to message me if you have any questions, though I’m not a Guix expert by any means, so the IRC channel on libera.chat is probably your best bet.

btw: you can also install guix as a standalone package manager on top of any other GNU/Linux distribution just like nix, and it can also use the nonguix channel.

Yes you can install non-free software on Guix. By default Guix only ships with non-free software in its iso and standard repo, but there is a nonguix channel (read repo) which comes with all the non-free software I’ve ever needed.

It’s very easy to add channels to Guix. Flatpak and Nix are also available on Guix if you’d prefer to use those ways of getting non-free software.

I quite enjoy it!

Being able to rollback any change I make to the system, either package changes or system configuration, makes it completely unbreakable and provides great peace of mind. It means I can fully enjoy its rolling-release nature without worrying.

Having my entire system configuration declared in a single, robust programming language (Guile) across a small number of files makes it very easy to understand and just stick into source control to reproduce.

Being able to hack on it in a lisp (scheme) is the cherry on top, along with the great emacs integration. I would highly recommend it to any lisp/emacs/gnu enthusiasts.