How to install a GuixSD desktop?

[Martin H.]

Hello,

first of all, thanks to everyone involved for making this project 
possible. It is a very promising alternative or rather a next step to 
package / systems management. I am Guix new newbie trying to go the full 
route of setting up a new desktop system on a laptop. My final target to 
have a system running as well as my previous (ArchLinux) one.

As seemingly all GuixSD beginners, I am feeling a bit lost. There is 
quite some documentation, but much of it works rather as a reference 
than as a guide. Also, many questions seem to have been answered on the 
mailing list already, but they are very cumbersome to find and skip 
through.

I think the project could do better lowering the barrier of entry to 
newbies, first of all through offering a FAQ. That would be really 
useful in my opinion.

Here are some questions I am currently struggling with, hoping for some 
help.

1) In addition to my operating system declaration set up using "guix 
system reconfigure", I have begun making a package manifest file 
(applied using "guix package -m") with specific packages for my user 
account, e.g. desktop applications. This seems to be a clean way of 
separating system and user packages.

When I started installing packages via the manifest (instead of 
manually), I noticed packages not in the manifest were being removed. 
Should've known what, my fault. I since then re-added packages that had 
been uninstalled.

But additionally I noticed things are not working anymore: Icons and 
window decorations in GTK applications are now missing, dmenu does not 
show any application entries. I don't know what is happening here? I 
tried switching to an older generation in my user profile, but the 
problem remains. So maybe something different changed. I am unsure why 
this XDG stuff does not work any more. Any hints?

2) I need to adjust the main Xorg configuration file in order to not 
load the synaptics driver. (From my experience, this is the only way to 
make libinput manage the touchpad, so I can get tap-to-click and 
multi-touch gestures working. This should probably be configurable in 
the future.) As gnu/services/xorg.scm does not allow adjusting these 
options, it means I have to change the original code.

So the question is, how can I replace a single service definition with 
my own one? Does this mean replacing the system guix instance with my 
own, modified checkout somehow?

3) I need to develop a few new packages for my needs. Is there a way to 
add additional package sources so I can conveniently use my own packages 
alongside the ones provides in the official Guix repo?

Thanks for listening ;)

Best
Martin