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by mudrockbestgirl 1276 days ago
I agree with you that the Nix language is a problem, and most likely a mistake in hindsight. Even for someone with lots of functional programming experience it's ugly with bad usability. I'm not familiar with Guix, but I am with Nix and

> Guix is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system

This sounds like it competes (?) with NixOS, but not with Nix. A reason for the popularity of Nix is that it's not only an operating system. Most Nix users probably haven't touched NixOS, but they use Nix as a package manager, build system, development environment, etc on their local machine. That target audience is a lot larger than those who want to adopt a whole new operating system.

This adoption of Nix outside of the operating system context naturally leads to more adoption of NixOS. If you already work with Nix anyway, it's not that huge of a jump towards adopting NixOS.
1 comments
msgilligan 1276 days ago
Guix is also both a package manager and a Linux distro:

> You can install GNU Guix on top of an existing GNU/Linux system where it complements the available tools without interference (see Installation), or you can use it as a standalone operating system distribution, Guix System2.

https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/en/html_node/Introduction.htm...

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mudrockbestgirl 1276 days ago
Interesting, I didn't realize this is the case. Unfortunately it looks like there won't ever be MacOS support, which makes this unusable for me.

I think my point about broader applicability still stands though. Compare the guix [0] and nix [1] homepages. The former mainly sells and operating system (and somewhat mentions a package manager), while the Nix homepage sells a tool, kind of like Docker, with concrete examples: Reproducible builds, trying new tools, declarative developer environments, docker images, cloud images. For a lot of people these are immediate practical use cases, which I think is the reason behind the adoption and hype.

I don't know anything about guix, so I'm not sure what of these you can do with guix, but at least the homepage and manual don't give me the impression that these are the use cases. I don't really need an additional package manger or a new OS, but the Nix use cases speak to me.

[0] https://guix.gnu.org/

[1] https://nixos.org/

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