Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

Its nice read. We need more of comparative posts by user familiar with both nix and guix.

We see bias with most discussions.

Only cons with Guix I see is, lack of infrastructure and less volunteers to work on guix eco-system. If its solved, I can imagine guix can improve exponentially.

The major con is in the article, it is super slow to update. Half an hour is just crazy, nobody will move to that if they know.

I play around with a Guix install in a VM, and with less than half of my system resources, a `guix pull` with a `guix system reconfigure ...` takes about 10 minutes. That said, if a pull happens to include a kernel update it can take much longer. I think pinning large packages (like the kernel) that may not need incidental updating is key to keeping pull times lower.

10 minutes is still an order of magnitude slower than a nixos-rebuild if you're hitting the cache, and there's no issue with forgetting to rebuild the guix profile. If you include nonguix (as is required for the 99% of users who need nonfree blobs) you get the 30-50 minutes as described in the article. I believe Nix-the-language being lazily evaluated is a big part of this; you can even inadvertently evaluate nixpkgs multiple times and not notice.