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by dlyons 898 days ago
Although Guix reads better than Nix (after all, it's Lisp), I found the support and resources available for learning severely lacking.

Plus, you have to jump through hoops to install non-free software, which goes against the ethos of Guix anyway.

IMHO, Nix is clearly "the winner" here and we'll see more and more adoption as it improves. Lots of folks are doing exciting work (see https://determinate.systems/, https://devenv.sh/, https://flakehub.com/). And the scale and organization around nixpkgs is damn impressive.

2 comments

You found support and documentation lacking? How so? The #guix and #nonguix channels are full of helpful people, and unlike Nix, it has a centralized, comprehensive handbook that covers about everything. Finding Nix documentation was a horrible experience in comparison. Yes, there are more Nix than Guix packages, but that hardly matters to me due to how easy it is to create packages for Guix. Devenv seems more or less like direnv?
Devenv includes direnv integration, but the main feature is organizing development environment configurations using a NixOS-like module system rather than declaring them as packages (simple functions).

Guix (deliberately) doesn't support anything like the NixOS module semantics. 'Services' are its alternative, of course. I don't know if there is a capability for per-project service declaration in Guix atm, but it wouldn't surprise me!

A distro not wanting to maintain closed source software packages seems reasonable

Anyone can create their packages channel or import existing

Also Interesting that you can now install Guix in Nix, or Nix in Guix, or both in any other distro

So you can easily install any package from Nix

There is a lot of work but flakes are still too confusing

So winning is relative