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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

From a quick glance, Guix seems to have a similar learning curve as Nix (at least it's based on Scheme, which I know). Is that impression correct? Anyway, I didn't find this “intuitively comprehensible” as an outsider.

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Guix is a reimagining of the concepts of Nix with Guile/Scheme instead of the Nix language, so they are very similar in overall feel, but differ in the details (e.g. GNU Shepherd vs systemd).

As for learning curve, I find Nix substantially easier, since the language is much simpler (JSON-like with lazy-functions) and doesn't need all that weirdness that result from using Scheme as configuration language (lots of quoting, module system, etc.)

As someone who has tried both, I found the learning curve for Guix much more pleasant than for Nix. With Nix, the community is for sure a lot larger, and more things are available (notably it is a lot faster, too). But I could never get everything clear in my head, how it hangs together, and the community seemed very much more fragmented than with Guix. I think the Guix documentation and manual, as well as the CLI and secondary docs written in people's blogs, were much easier to get a handle on than with Nix. Flakes are a great example, I still have no idea what a flake is, they are still an experimental feature, and I have no idea how I should think about them. I've been using NixOS full time for 3 years by the way.

I also think the shepherd alone is almost a killer app relative to something like systemd. I had to write a service myself for restarting ssh tunnels, and I could even do "advanced" things like templated configuration, almost trivially. It felt like a superpower, relative to systemd services.

the nix community is mostly from js so they have a tendency to quickly rushing to solve some problem, and this leads to a lot of cargo cult nonsense that often involves lot of blind copy and paste

Huh? Do the community surveys indicate that or something? JS definitely isn't the language I think of first when I think of Nix users.

> Flakes are a great example, I still have no idea what a flake is

A package that fully specifies its dependencies (via flake.nix/flake.lock) instead of depending on whatever the user has in their Nix channels. You enable them via:

    nix.settings.experimental-features = [ "nix-command" "flakes" ];

And then forget about "nix-channel", "nix-env" and all the old ways of doing stuff, the new "nix" command is much easier to understand and much closer to what guix is doing.

The fun part with flakes is that they turn git repositories into full packages, meaning you can do stuff like:

   nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.2.0rc1

or use other git repositories directly as dependencies.

That flakes are still marked as experimental is annoying, but they have been working fine for well over three years.

Correct, and it's Linux-only and more hardcore FOSS (i .e. they don't have any blessed way to use non-free software).

I'm not sure why it's being sold as an alternative to Nix/NixOS

Because it's an alternative which guarantees freedom?

just not freedom to use propriety software

It's easy to use proprietary software with Guix and nearly all users do this.

Cool, I didn't realize I could use it on my Windows or Mac machines. That's actually what's been holding me back.

Only Free Software guarantees that you have the final say in a matter of using arbitrary proprietary software.

If you regard it as an alternative to NixOS rather than Nix the package manager then both are Linux.

Some people want FOSS only, some people dislike systemd, some people like Scheme....

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