I Went Back From Trisquel 8 Alpha to Trisquel 7 and This Is What Happened
After I accidentally "nuked" my Trisquel 8 Alpha install, I moved back to Trisquel 7 because I heard from ADFENO and others that you can use the Guix package manager with it.
Some things I would like to say and I may add more later as I get up and running more...
- The Linux-Libre Kernel messes up my installation, possibly due to the fact I am using a laptop connected to a dock that has monitors plugged into it. Trisquel 8 could handle this well using Compiz Configuration Manager. I had to reinstall the default Trisquel 7 kernel. Booting up with the Linux-Libre kernel with my dual monitors plugged into my dock causes me to boot into the terminal with an error that it cannot display the Desktop Environment.
- I can't get Both of my monitors to non-mirrored with my dock-laptop situation without plugging one monitor into the dock and the other into the laptop directly, which makes my laptop annoying to be portable because I need to unplug the monitor attached to my laptop
- I was able to move my home directory (and config files in it) from Trisquel 8 to Trisquel 7 with no problems
- Trisquel 7 uses Init - which is fine, but I often forget that I don't have system D installed.
- Caja from Trisquel 8 is more useful to me than the default Trisquel 7 file manager.
- Automatically mounting USB drives seems to work more consistently for me in Trisquel 8 than 7. Particularly the "Disks" app doesn't seem to be doing what its supposed to do in Trisquel 7 ... I am not 100% sure of this though.
I would say most of these are very minor. Trisquel 7 + Guix to me is basically almost like using Trisquel 8 alpha. Guix gives me more current packages and to me that is basically why I would upgrade to a later version of an OS.
What are the other benefits of upgrading to Trisquel 8?
Trisquel/Guix (or as I've taken to calling it lately, Trisquel+Guix) is a great solution. You get the stability of a LTS distro with the ability to upgrade a package to the latest version of a package if necessary. That said, since the packages in Trisquel 8 are more up-to-date, I've found since upgrading that I don't have to rely on Guix as often, which has had some advantages.
- Updating and installing with apt is faster and more convenient. guix pull takes much longer than apt update. When binary substitutes are not available Guix will begin building from source, which is better than the install failing, but it once took 16 hours just to install Emacs, which then wouldn't launch.
- Many packages in Trisquel have not been packaged yet in Guix. For instance, Guix has none of the popular GUI mail clients or web browsers. Trisquel 8 already has Abrowser/Firefox 57, whereas Trisquel 7 does not and there is no equivalent in Guix.
- I recommend Trisquel to people who want to use an accessible libre distro. While I'm comfortable supplementing Trisquel with Guix, they would not be. When possible, I prefer solutions to protect my freedom that will help my friends as well.
- This might be a bit of an edge case, but Trisquel 8 has the latest stable version of Lilypond (2.18.2) and Guix always has the latest development version (currently 2.19.63). This makes it very easy to have both versions installed alongside each other. Back when I used Trisquel 7, which has 2.16.2, I had to rely on Guix just to get the current stable version. By default Guix will only install the latest devel version of Lilypond, and it took quite a bit of support from the guix-help mailing list to override Guix's default behavior in this way.