this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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I've been saying this for years: Just switch to Guix.
Yah 100% free no thanks. And I actually like systemd.
I've considered it, but i like nix better than scheme, and i need non-free software and kernel, which is doable with non-guix but much more tedious with third party iso's. I went back to Void linux but i still use nix + home manager, and the huge repo alone wins out for me.
Also, a fraction of packages, users and guides.
I think Guix is great, but as a NixOS enthusiast who genuinely wanted to try it out, I gave up in the face of the lack of docs for people who aren't working in lab or have a PhD in computing of some sort.
Also, how is shepherd better than systems? Genuinely curious.
Lastly, I agree Nix is not a very enjoyable language, but scheme doesn't look like a very beginner friendly option either. Could be wrong, I'm not a programmer.
As someone who is curious about Nix but has given up after trying to wade through the myriad and conflicting "getting started" resources for it, I cant imagine how bad guix docs must be for a Nix enthusiast to adandon it.
If you are still trying to find the best guide, I recommend this one
https://thiscute.world/en/posts/my-experience-of-nixos/
That's one the books I tried to get through. Maybe it was in a more raw state at the time, but it didn't click for me.
Guix basically only has the official docs (which has a lot missing in my experience), a single Youtube channel (System Crafters), official issues/mailing list/IRC, System Crafters forum, the source code, toys.whereis.social, and rarely a blog post or random git repo that might have the information you need
Im honestly more interested in Nix, as even with all the chaos it feels like it has good technical momentum. I just wish there was something equivalent to Geerlings "Ansibles for devops" or Shotts "The linux command line" for it.
I'm pretty sure Guile isn't pure functional either, while Nix is
How do you do Flakes with Guix? That's probably the most important feature Nix has.
Not sure I would agree with that lol
whenever I asked about something in irc I got fairly swift and very helpful responses 🤷
I was trying to package Typst for them once. The IRC barely gave me any help, nor did the mailing list, so I had to guess a lot of things on my own. I ended up spending several hours working on it and fine tuning it to what the documentation wanted as much as I could. Then I finally made the submission, which was ignored for an entire year, before finally being rejected. It's clear that the package repository has a severe lack of packages, but if there's no clear way to contribute, then idk how anyone can take the project seriously.
I've also encountered bugs that made the tools unusable on my laptop that similarly got no response on IRC and the mailing lists.
Meanwhile on Nix, if I submit an issue on Nixpkgs, it will usually get resolved by the maintainer in 24 hours, or at most a week if it's a larger change, and I don't even have to do anything, and things aren't constantly broken on aarch64.
I enjoy lisp and emacs but nothing will convince me to use guix over nixos. At most I guess I would switch to arch and use the guix package manager there.
Is it non-trivial to enable non-free repos?
no it isn't, non-guix is right there and only one line in the right file
https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
Quite trivial
Never tried! But I'm assuming it's a pain indeed. Not even Signal Desktop works out-of-the-box (or maybe at all, haven't tried either) because of Electron.
That sounds like a pretty useless replacement for people who want a declarative configuration and a PC capable of doing anything other than contributing code to open source projects.
It seems to me like you didn't do your homework before posting, since what you write is patently untrue. Guix is actually, primarily, a (very much functional/declarative) package manager which you can also install on top of other Linuces, even RHEL. Then there's the Guix operating system, which is very much useful for many tasks other than developing free software.
I've been eyeing Guix for a while but haven't jumped in yet. Honestly, I feel like I'm finally getting comfortable with nixos and flakes over the years. There's quite a bit of un/relearning to do, and I can't tell if the flow of Guix's channels/inferiors would match the ease of composability that I like with flakes. The lock system really does it for me and I don't like the idea of hunting down refs to pin manually or maintaining my own frankenstein repo (other than my config).
That said, I do use emacs and actually like lisp, so I'm torn right now.