1. Small package base.
My workflow includes running Julia on CUDA, editing from VS Code. Remarkably, Guix has both Julia and (on a third-party PKG repo) CUDA. What it's missing is VS Code. I understand that VS Code is non-free (like Chrome, it attaches trademarks on its branding), but there's no VS Codium I could find either. I also can't find Atom. Am I missing something?
2. Package index mirroring.
Nix has an issue where Python, Node and other "third-party" packages have to be manually added to nixpkgs. If you want celery or requests, you're in luck because those are popular. If you want something more obscure, like pywikibot, you have to add it yourself (or run pip/npm yourself, and forego the benefits of Nix/Guix.) Does Guix address this?
3. Ease of scripting.
This might be a plus for Guix, since Nix design patterns are arcane (the language is easy, things like overrides and needing to replace broken URLs is hard), but how easy is it to debug failing builds? Is there something like a debugger, or at least a way to shell-in and call things yourself?
Bonus #4: broken URLs. is there a cache? what can be done?