I have chosen Guix as my new home partly for this reason.
I’d love to use guix instead of nix, the language is far better and the repl is incomparably more useful.
But nix has 4x the packages, a third of guix packages are seriously out of date (last time I checked docker was behind even Debian), and those numbers are inflated by Emacs and lisp packages most people won’t use. And that’s before going into a serious lack of prebuilt bins causing you to leave large projects like firefox to compile over night, having to add additional repos to get nonfree packages, and essentially being forced to use Emacs for good UX.
Even installing guixos on a laptop requires a special ISO and instructions from system crafters due to nonfree packages.
Being Linux only is also hurting its applications for work, but that’s not as relevant for personal use.
Guix is still really far away from being a real alternative.
I’d love to use guix instead of nix, the language is far better and the repl is incomparably more useful.
But nix has 4x the packages, a third of guix packages are seriously out of date (last time I checked docker was behind even Debian), and those numbers are inflated by Emacs and lisp packages most people won’t use. And that’s before going into a serious lack of prebuilt bins causing you to leave large projects like firefox to compile over night, having to add additional repos to get nonfree packages, and essentially being forced to use Emacs for good UX.
Even installing guixos on a laptop requires a special ISO and instructions from system crafters due to nonfree packages.
Being Linux only is also hurting its applications for work, but that’s not as relevant for personal use.
Guix is still really far away from being a real alternative.