Comment by ryukafalz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryukafalz | Hacker News Reader

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I much prefer Guix UI-wise but it has some downsides:

— I’ve had more jank on Guix System as a desktop OS than on NixOS. Specifically some dbus-related stuff like notifications and appindicators (when running sway + waybar) has been very unreliable for me under Guix in ways that it hasn’t been on any other distro I’ve tried including NixOS. Still haven’t figured out why.

- Guix is slow compared to Nix. This is especially noticeable on older/weaker hardware.

- Nix home-manager has a lot more options than Guix’s equivalent - it’s really nice being able to rely on it for things like sway configuration.

That said, between the two I do lean towards Guix because I do gravitate towards Scheme more than the Nix DSL. I just wish it were a bit more polished.

Nix also runs on macOS. I think it gets a lot more traction among devs than Guix does for this reason alone.

> - Guix is slow compared to Nix. This is especially noticeable on older/weaker hardware.

Yeah, I have noted it is not the fastest snail on the lawn. On the other hand, I have seen so much time wasted on integration and reproducibility issues, that I'd be happy to run one day a week nothing else than a Guix install and not have any of these issues.

GNU Guix, much like Emacs, is a set of LISP (guile) scripts running on top of a small C runtime. Nix is mostly C++ in comparison.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix

Guix is also very verbose compared to nix.

Which is a good thing because most users do not want to configure and program Guix stuff all the time. Many will only use it every few months, and probably don't want to learn syntax and semantics again and again.

Extreme terseness like APL or math notation is fine if you work with something all the time. However for infrastructure code and especially build systems, I think readability as well as robustness are much more important aspects.

It's hard for me to find a good point about the verboseness and repetition of for example https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/mediagoblin.git/tree/guix-...

This is the old style. See https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2021/the-big-change/

It's scheme. I assume you can macro that repetition away if you really want to.

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