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After playing with NixOS the past few days, never touched Guix, I think the former is more likely to be "taken seriously."

The ideas behind Nix/Guix are really interesting and a major improvement from traditional packagement solutions, and personally I much prefer using Scheme than a Haskell-derived DSL to configure my environment and operating system.

The problem is a political one: NixOS ships with current Linux standard technologies such as systemd, while this Guix-based OS uses this GNU dmd project I've never heard of until now, but I have no doubts its features and maturity is a fraction of systemd's (whatever is your opinion on systemd).

All for the sake of the free software radicalism. I love GNU and FSF and everything, but as a Linux user and administrator I'd really like we settle on something and build from there.

I may be mistaken, and open to criticism.

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systemd works exclusively with the Linux kernel, and thus it's infeasible for the GNU system to settle on it. Here's current dmd maintainer's (Courtès) take on the matter: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/25abkh/what_is_wrong_...

I clicked through to gnu42's profile to make sure I correctly identified Courtès in that thread and... wow.

"Seriously, when was the last time you heard someone arguing whether it's dmd or DMD, or the same for any other init system other than SystemD? The reason SystemD fags complain is because they want people to respect their brand image - they're in the marketing business. Nobody else gives a shit."

You, uh, wow.

Talk about technological merits, huh? The onus is on him to prove that dmd is a viable alternative.

You've incorrectly identified Courtès.

Well, than I would like to extend my apologies to Ludovic Courtès.

Aforementioned discorteous post from reddit user would really be understandable coming from a GNU enthusiast if caustic in form.

The features are a fraction of systemd's, yes. This is because dmd actually has a concrete idea of what it wants to do, and doesn't just arbitrarily consolidate functionality under the pretense of being a "basic building block to make a Linux-based OS from".

As for maturity, you are mistaken. GNU dmd was first started around 2003, before even launchd existed.

Software isn't a biological entity, you can't measure maturity with just age.

Hell, you can't even measure a person's maturity with just age.

Maturity != age, maturity == number of eyes on a project + bugs fixed + real world usage.

As a comparison, the Hurd project started in 1990, Ubuntu in 2004. Which one is more mature? That is, which one would you use in a production environment?

You're comparing apples and squirrels. You probably wanted to say Linux or more mature than Hurd despite its 1 year head start, which is not as dramatic.

Neither.

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