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by ayrtondesozzla 396 days ago
Agreed on Guix. Used it for a few years, absolutely loved it, excited to go back (had to move off for unimportant and unrelated reasons).

Would love to hear from someone who has used both though.

I've never seen an excellent, detailed comparison actually, as conversation on the subject tends to devolve into a "discussion" on ethics. Meaning, people who dislike GNU or GPL or Lisps or something get testy and argue uncharitably (imho, please prove me wrong, not flaming here, etc).

This is ironic, to say the least, as one of the main points of the proponents of the "anti-GNU" side tends to be how Guix is too opinionated and pushy and hard-line etc. So we've a classic upside-down situation, which is a real shame, as Guix seems to be in reality a practical project with lovely people involved that's doing very interesting work.

2 comments

The Guix blog has really good and detailed discussions of things Guix has done differently than Nix! Posts on the choice of different abstractions for modeling services in Guix is probably a good starting point.

The UI differences are also striking right away. Guix has a more unified CLI, and the main Guix repo seems to more quickly absorb functionality that's split into various community projects in Nix.

Guix not supporting non-free packages out of the box is the only real issue I have and that’s directly tied to the gnu origins. If guix were as pragmatic as NixOS and nixpkgs then I don’t think I’d have anything to say, lisp is way nicer.
“Don’t promote” sigh