| Guix is very nice, but suffers a bit from: - Having less development effort than Nix involved in packaging; some packages end up broken/out of date as a result - Its more "pure" packaging ethos (no bundled dependencies, all dependencies must themselves be packages for Guix, etc). I like this in theory but practically it makes packaging some applications (Go/Node ones especially) effectively impossible. Debian seems to have the same issue: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/835599/b4de94c924ae4463/ - The build farm often doesn't have substitutes available for certain packages, which tend to be precisely the ones that take ages to build on older hardware. Cue multi-hour IceCat builds - There's not much documentation available on packaging beyond the trivial cases. Packaging many applications is pretty simple, but for the ones that aren't it's a bit of a guessing game and trying to read through definitions of other involved packages All that aside... these are complaints that I have as a dedicated Guix user, and I've thoroughly enjoyed my time using Guix System. It's the first distro I've ever used that I haven't felt has gotten "polluted" after over a year of tinkering with it - I've installed (and uninstalled) multiple DEs, and I know I can trust the package manager to actually remove every single thing that was installed as part of that. And it's really nice to use a distro whose entire configuration system and package definitions are written in a single language (Guile) - I've written a few simple package definitions myself and I think the fact that it's all written in the same language has made it easier to dive deeper into how the system works after having written a few packages. |