Guix days 2026 retrospective

2026-02-13T00:26:00Z

Last week, from Monday to Tuesday was Guix days! Guix days is an annual FOSDEM fringe event, where Guix hackers from Europe and abroad meet. This year was my second time going, and I was waiting for it all year! In this post, I’ll do a quick retrospective of what happened, and my thoughts on it. Thanks to Futurile for suggesting that I make this post :)

Prequel: FOSDEM

Right before Guix days was FOSDEM. FOSDEM is a Guix days fringe event for me, but I still go! I met up with friends that I made last year. I didn’t see that many talks, given that I missed both mornings.

On Saturday, I found both of my FOSDEM friends at Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Talon’s talk; where else could they be? I also spotted a bunch of Guix hackers, and Andrew Tropin! Andrew was my internship mentor for five months, it was awesome finally meeting him in person.

I can’t overstate how heartwarming it is for me to think back to these moments. These are the people I interact with when most evenings I open my laptop and do anything Guix related. And in these moments there is not one doubt that I’m in the right place, with the best people.

Moving on from the emotional section (we’ll come back to it later, don’t worry). It was nice of Indieterminacy to setup dinner for everyone, so that’s where I went before going to bed.

On Sunday, I woke up thirty minutes late, missed breakfast, and most talks of the morning! A tragedy that would be bad if it didn’t end up with me getting front-row seats to Andy Wingo’s talk 😎 Anyways, I went to the stands in the afternoon, met the cool people that make Codeberg and Reuse and ended the day with another Guix dinner.

Monday

Needless to say, when I arrived on Monday, I was much more confident than last year. There were several people that I had met multiple times by this point, at JdLL for example. And it felt like most people knew my name from being in the 1.5.0 release team. In fact, I even got recognized by someone I didn’t know‼

The day is organized with rounds of multiple breakout sessions, each with a guiding topic and for each round you chose a session to go to.

On this day, I first attended a session about refreshing the bootstrap chain, like most other sessions I attended, I went to learn more about a topic instead of trying to participate too much. The reasoning was that I could always discuss the topics I was already involved in outside of Guix days.

We then had a breakout session about how to go forward with our consensus-based decision making process. One thing we noticed here and that seemed to be a common topic among other sessions was improving the communication channels, as well as the roles expected from team members. We also talked about amending the process, but we didn’t go too in-depth on the topic.

Tuesday

On tuesday, I unfortunately had to leave early to attend an exam the next day at 8am (which I nailed by the way!) Still, I had time for a last session about the release process. The release process was a pretty big thing to happen in Guix, its a great success of our consensus decision process. And it shows that the decisions taken can turn into achieving great goals.

My last breakout session was when a person asked me for money on the subway home. I gave them the lowest bill in my wallet and it was like I changed their life. I gave them a hug and left. It was very contrasting to see the state that so many homeless people are living in Brussels and elsewhere while I’m obliviously living my best life…

A few days earlier, I also saw a person in the Brussels subway. They were sleeping with a water bottle in hand. Some guy violently snatched the bottle from them and started verbally abusing them. It was terrifying, and I didn’t do anything! Nor did anyone else.

And there were so many drugged people in the streets, sniffing in plain view, trying to hide on a door step.

Those were pretty striking moments about the state of my world… I’m pretty much free to radicalise by this point. And even with all the fun I had, I’ll end the post on this sad note.

Thanks to anyone who read this far.

Connecting to a Cisco AnyConnect VPN on Guix System

2025-11-06T19:55:00Z

Introduction

Yesterday, I got access to a virtual machine from my university for a school project. Great! The only catch: it was only accessible in the internal network via an obscure VPN protocol.

As soon as I heard the name Cisco, I knew I was up for some bad surprises. And so when the instructions to connect started with “Download the Cisco Secure Client” I was already prepared to look for a good free software implementation instead.

And so I found a very nice project called “openconnect”, and its GNOME frontend called “networkmanager-openconnect”. Setting it up on Guix was very simple, and I was surprised by how well it interacted with the rest of the system!

In this post, I present a short tutorial for future me and others to do the same.

Tutorial

The first step is to install the software of course! For the CLI users, just do guix shell openconnect. For the NetworkManager users (part of %desktop-services, you can unlock the GUI integration with a slight modification to the network-manager service:

    
(modify-services %desktop-services
                 (network-manager-service-type
                  config =>
                  (network-manager-configuration
                   (inherit config)
                   (vpn-plugins (list (with-openconnect-master network-manager-openconnect))))))

After this, you can connect to the VPN using the openconnect command or, even better, the GNOME settings application (as a NetworkManager interface). In my case, there were two pitfalls:

Setting “AnyConnect” as user agent to avoid a 404 error.
Using a package transformation to use the latest master commit of openconnect, where the SSO was working correctly. Otherwise getting “Cookie was rejected by server; exiting.” error in the NetworkManager logs.

And that’s all it took! I can now connect to the virtual machine from anywhere through the VPN. A browser tab is automatically opened every time I connect to login through SSO. Free software wins yet again!