[opan]

Basic commands in guix are simpler, last I compared them. "guix install", "guix upgrade", etc. These are equivalent to longer guix package commands like "guix package -i" and "guix package -u". I recall nix's package install command being odd, something like "nix-env -ia".

Package names in guix are very consistent, lowercase and hyphen-separated. I recall some nix packages having capital letters in them. It could certainly be confusing.

For declarative user packages, guix has manifests. This is a first class feature. You make a list of packages in a .scm file and apply it, which adds or removes things as needed. With Nix you need to use Home Manager, which isn't part of the main Nix project. A bit of a shame, as this declarative package management is a big selling point, and separating system and user packages lets you have a small system list for fast kernel upgrades and such, while you can keep stuff like icecat in user profile and know that the user package updates may take longer. (especially if there's no substitute and it has to be built)

I think more care is taken to making things simple for the user with guix. What you lose out on is number of things packaged. However, I find guix packages generally have less problems. Nix's mpv package performed worse than guix's with guix being on two generations older hardware (ThinkPad X220T w/ i5 being better than ThinkPad T440p w/ i7). I also ran into strange bugs in some things like pcmanfm. It may be not every package gets much attention and use.

I would say I'm an average user as far as just using my system but not contributing much aside from bug reports.

Note: In all examples I was using each package manager on its home distro, not a foreign distro.

[snicker7]

This has been my experience, too. Granted, I have used guix longer than Nix.

Another advantage of Guix is just how readable package definitions are. Nix packages often contain embedded shell code + a "functional" DSL. Guix packages are written in a much more declarative style. It kind-of looks like executable JSON (I guess that's the point of lisp, right?).

[aidenn0]

FWIW, on NixOS, you can use buildEnv in a .nix file to have your user environment be completely declarative. I discovered this before I discovered home-manager and it's still what I use.