I don't know that much about Guix, other than "super-free Nix with scheme" (and the article wasn't particularly illuminating other than boiling down to "Guix isn't really ready for most users right now"), but it's neat that there's momentum in the declarative OS-space. I hope that both Guix and NixOS keep growing and that more people start switching.
After switching to NixOS, I'd find it very frustrating to go back to an OS with imperative-style package/service management. It's clearly the better way.
A frustrating thing about NixOS--coming from Arch Linux and being used to the AUR--is that adding packages/updating packages can be a bit slow due to the sheer volume of PRs/Issues on the nixpkgs repo. There's always the NUR[1] but it hasn't picked up that much momentum yet (probably because it's kind of hard to search the darn thing). Eitherway, the packages are just Nix expressions and repos are just collections of these expressions, so nothing's preventing a real AUR alternative other than momentum.
It's interesting that Guix uses scheme instead of a home-baked configuration language like NixOS. While I don't find Nix particularly offensive, I don't find it particularly great either. And maybe this is naivity/Nix-inexperience on my part speaking, but I really wish that Nix had a proper type system and was strictly typed.
I guess my pipe dream is "HaskellOS" that's basically NixOS configured with Haskell (just think of xmonad-style configuration for your whole OS). That'd be really nice. And my secondary-pipe dream is a baked in, extremely-comprehensive home-manager[2] so we can bid dotfiles goodbye once and for all and have your entire system-state defined in a single file.
Maybe one day :)
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/NUR
[2] https://github.com/rycee/home-manager
After switching to NixOS, I'd find it very frustrating to go back to an OS with imperative-style package/service management. It's clearly the better way.
A frustrating thing about NixOS--coming from Arch Linux and being used to the AUR--is that adding packages/updating packages can be a bit slow due to the sheer volume of PRs/Issues on the nixpkgs repo. There's always the NUR[1] but it hasn't picked up that much momentum yet (probably because it's kind of hard to search the darn thing). Eitherway, the packages are just Nix expressions and repos are just collections of these expressions, so nothing's preventing a real AUR alternative other than momentum.
It's interesting that Guix uses scheme instead of a home-baked configuration language like NixOS. While I don't find Nix particularly offensive, I don't find it particularly great either. And maybe this is naivity/Nix-inexperience on my part speaking, but I really wish that Nix had a proper type system and was strictly typed.
I guess my pipe dream is "HaskellOS" that's basically NixOS configured with Haskell (just think of xmonad-style configuration for your whole OS). That'd be really nice. And my secondary-pipe dream is a baked in, extremely-comprehensive home-manager[2] so we can bid dotfiles goodbye once and for all and have your entire system-state defined in a single file.
Maybe one day :)
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/NUR
[2] https://github.com/rycee/home-manager