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Many design decisions are different. Nix and Guix are each other's Bizarro. It's a common misconception that Guix is just "Nix with Scheme" or "Nix without systemd" but those are frankly the least interesting differences.

An example is that the package definitions sit in the same repo as the package manager, freeing the definition language to evolve without regard for compatibility (because they will always be read by the correct version of Guix) whereas Nix has to freeze the definition language and always test that old definitions work. Obviously there are pros and cons to each approach. https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2018/multi-dimensional-transaction...

Can you elaborate on those differences?

The concepts seemed pretty similar to me.

Added an example.

Also the dev communities care about slightly different things. They match my tastes, we find the same kinds of things cool, so I've found nothing but joy in Guix. One matter of practical impact is how they prioritize blurring the line between user and contributor -- "uplifting" users into contributors as much as possible. I saw that as the biggest flaw of Gentoo, it was very hard to even know how to start contributing.

Perhaps you should try Exherbo then.

They take the opposite approach and insist that all users be contributors and are often unwilling to provide support to users that aren't at least somewhat contributing back. Their dream is a system where all users are contributors.

https://www.exherbo.org/ That does sound nice. I'd like to know how it differs from Guix.

It's package manager is more so similar to Portage; and it can in fact be used on Gentoo as an alternative thereto.

> they prioritize blurring the line between user and contributor -- "uplifting" users into contributors as much as possible

Can you explain more about this? How do they uplift?

For a detailed "Guix vs. Nix" comparison, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16490027 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529932.

In a nutshell, these are two different projects, with common foundations, but also different technology and different focuses--just like Julia and Clang are different, even though they both use LLVM.

The project blogs and documentation should already give a feel of how those differences play in practice!

I had read both of those before.

The first one primarily just says "we use Scheme instead of Nix lang".

There are some differences that emerge from that, but most of what is described is also common or possible with Nix.

The analogy of clang vs Julia does not fit for me.

Nothing I've seen has yet described any significant difference, but rather affirmed that both are very similar in most regards.

It's not just Nix lang it replaces, we use Scheme in place of a hodgepodge of languages (shell script, Nix, C and others). Almost all equivalents to C-hardcoded parts of Nix is inspectable and modifiable in Guix. There's code reuse across the stack. Even the systemd substitute is opened up for inspection and modification. Nix glues a lot of black boxes; Guix is a single white box. Both approaches are practical for different reasons.

As someone who lives in nixos about 90% of the time, I really do just want Nix but LISP, and if thats what Guix was I would have switched a long time ago

The embedded package repository is actually a major con IMHO. Making backwards incompatible changes is easy inside your monorepo, but if you a user building software it means that your code now depends on specific guix reversions as well as a specific commit.

In nix land, the more stable API means we are moving further into composible modules. Meaning you can now very easily have all your companies code in different (or one big) repositories that can reference each other easily.

However having used both guix and nix for several years now, I am firmly in camp they are the same.

The porcelain of guix is much nicer, but each can do everything the other does.

To me guix and nix are similar to a comparison of fedora and ubuntu. Both fedora and ubuntu are fairly different, but there is there is a 1:1 method to do everything in one in the other. Having only used fedora, you could easily figure out ubuntu. Everything is essentially done the exact same way, but different tools.

The same is true with guix and nix.

The Guix way moves more contribution upstream (it's very easy to get your PR accepted) and less people having their own untested "PPAs" everywhere. People have this image that having a private channel is simpler/faster somehow as it skips hoops but in Guix it's just not true (what hoops?). You can submit PR after PR after PR for something only you would ever care about.

The main reason not to is when you want to keep your codebase secret, right? Composible modules are certainly another solution. I don't know what's ultimately best but I think we could perhaps make it easier to pin a specific Guix revision. Perhaps require it. It already runs different versions of itself so often, it's part of the way it should work.

> less people having their own untested "PPAs" everywhere

This is not my experience with Nix.

1. My system configuration pulls in a couple of programs in from unstable for my convenience and it was incredibly easy.

2. I don't do any serious 3rd-party packages or package configuration at the system level. Instead, any package configuration (e.g. overrides, Docker images) and 3rd-party packages absent from Nixpkgs - usually pretty easy to write, if not trivial - are defined in the repository where they are required. They are used - and tested - and reproducable to the pinned Nixpkgs in that repository.

It has been incredibly easier than PPAs and Gentoo overlays. Presumably safer too (though this is an incomplete thought).

To be fair the learning curve was medium, and I didn't invest any serious effort. Instead I made progress until frustrated and asked colleagues to help a few times until I grokked it. From the perspective of a simple user, the single system configuration file is a killer feature even if you don't venture any further.

A system like Guix will have at least a magnitude more private manifests.

Form personal shell scripts and environment configs, over team development environments to custom software. Non of that can be upstreamed. Plus the proprietary software, which also can't be upstreamed.

I concur that not having a stable format is a potentially problematic design decision, not a benefit.

Can you explain again why it'd have more private manifests? I'm not that familiar with Nix, but don't you use scripts, configs and environments all the same?

There is a home manager for Guix:

https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde

It will likely be included in the next version of Guix. Note that declarative environments are already well-supported with "manifests" (I have a lot of them).

It's curious that you list "strong focus on freedom" as a con. I love that I can exercise my "four freedoms" on any package in Guix, and be certain that there are no binary or proprietary bits. There are several third party channels covering non-free software needs.

Thanks for the manager link.

> There are several third party channels covering non-free software needs.

Can you link some of them? I've kept a list over the years for when I decided to try Guix again, but it's not up to date. And some like [1] aren't being maintained anymore.

While I support this strong stance on free software from a philosophical standpoint, it's practically unusable as my main distro because of my current hardware. I'd love to see a distro based on Guix that breaks this GNU principle and focuses on general ease of use.

[1]: https://github.com/guix-users/guix-nonfree

> It's curious that you list "strong focus on freedom" as a con

Not OP, but I see the two sides of it. On the one hand, I totally understand your position.

On the other hand, if I take my personal case as an academia user, I can't use Guix just because I can't get e.g. CUDA with it. And neither I nor my lab will ever have the time and means to reimplement a free CUDA, so we can only suck it up.

> Strong focus on freedom and not packaging proprietary software.

Yes, and I like that BUT Guix, unlike NixOS, does not have an easy to install and well-tested ZFS implementation, even though ZFS IS free (and non-proprietary, and copyleft to boot (pun not intended)). For me at least, this is a dealbreaker.

Another Pro for Guix, first class support in Emacs.

If that's your kinda thing.

There is a home manager people are testing out, it was on the mailing list the other week.

I wish they had gone with OpenRC as the initd. It's fairly popular but doesn't go overboard the way systemd does. Shepherd is pretty slow.

> Built with LISP

*Scheme

Risking starting a flame-war but I really don't want to, this is a question of curiosity, not looking down/up on any languages:

Isn't Scheme "a lisp" even though most people usually distinct them? The similarities between Scheme and Common Lisp seems to be greater than any of the two and Clojure, and usually people refer to Clojure as a Lisp but it's hearsay to claim Scheme is a Lisp.

Of course, C2 already have a page on the subject (https://wiki.c2.com/?IsSchemeLisp) so if you want to share a new opinion on the subject, make sure it hasn't already been said :)

(Offtopic) C2 has a really good <noscript>.

> Isn't Scheme "a lisp" even though most people usually distinct them?

I would agree on a broad scale. But GP wrote LISP in capitals, which I often see used to mean Lisp-the-language rather than Lisp-the-concept, hence my precision.

Con (for me): The team is strongly anti-RMS, including wanting him to resign as GNU project leader.

This is off-topic, but I have to bite: "anti-RMS" is such a reductionist way to express this. Is our language so impoverished that we must be reduced to "anti-this" and "pro-this"?

Who's "the team", by the way? There is a maintainer collective and hundreds of contributors, and it should be no surprise that they don't all have the same opinion on everything.

For what it's worth: I'm a GNU maintainer and I don't want RMS to be the leader of the GNU project. I'm not "anti-RMS", just "anti-RMS-as-GNU-project-leader". I do think RMS has a voice that should be heard when it is about free software philosophy.

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...

I would call that post on the GUIX blog strongly anti-RMS.

That seems like a strange interpretation. That post says he is owed a debt of gratitude.

You're wrong. Not giving RMS a free pass to do or say whatever he wants for all eternity is literally cancel culture.

And that’s all, apparently. They would like to see him replaced as project leader.

Not the whole team. There are people with different opinions.

> Not systemd based. Say of systemd what you will, but there is a reason almost every distro has adopted it. It's just better. Also: most Linux users are familiar with systemd tooling by now, so that makes adoption even harder.

Yet, the only reason you are most likely giving this one piece of software special treatment, among the many other different pieces of software in NixOS and GuixSD, is as reactionism to the many, just as vocal voices, that chose not to adopt it, with just as much fanfare to the mention of not doing so.

It strikes me as odd to list as an objective advantage the one piece of software that has been the most controversial in the last decade, and it's controversy is most likely the reason you decided to mention it.

I can't say I agree with your assessment. As someone who has used both, there are a lot of nice things in systemd that aren't really present in GNU shepherd (yet?)

What does that have to with my assessment?

Nothing in my post compared systemd with shepherd or talked about any of the features of either. — it simply pointed out that systemd was specifically chosen of all software that GuixSD does not have because there's often debate about it, not for technical reasons.

I don't know about other places, but here I don't agree that it wasn't for technical reasons. To me it seems like one of the key differences between them. Guix wants to have all the package and service definitions written in Scheme. Otherwise systemd would probably work well for them, judging by the usage in Nix anyway.

Guix has nothing to do with systemd, GuixSD does. — the two are distinct.

There is no reason why Guix can't be used to install systemd, but the software runs contrary to the GuixSD philosophy, in that it wants as much as possible to be an interpreter whose internals are hackable.

Again I don't think that's a correct assessment, Guix actually does have some overlap with systemd because they decided to put some containerization things there. In Nix, this would be delegated to systemd.

I also wouldn't say that that runs contrary to the GuixSD philosophy, as there are a lot of packages in Guix that are written in C and C++ and other compiled languages, and I don't believe they plan to replace them. Maybe I'm wrong about that? At some point it might be interesting to have a Lisp/Scheme-only distro. Of course the kernel would still pose a problem there.