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.

Important question is if its fixable.

Nix is pathologically recursive, lazy, and uses fixed points, things that are very apt to changing something that cascades through a bunch of dependents. Nix's runtime is not magic. Guile should be able to expose a language and evaluate it in a similar way.

For my part, I've not opted into Guix because it's a GNU project, and I've decided to avoid anything in the FSF sphere of influence. Their orthodoxy turns off contributors and they have a history of taking insular hard-liner approaches that are utopian. Outside of coreutils that are about to be fully subsumed by rewrite-it-in-Rust (which has a community that is not a fan of the GPL), what has had FSF backing and been successful? Linus starts two of the most influential pieces of software in human civilization and RMS wants to name the awards. The pragmatic culture that shifted away from the FSF has I think largely adopted Nix, and it shows. Nix is open for business, available on lots of platforms, has commercial entities built around its success.

> what has had FSF backing and been successful?

GCC is still indispensable. I doubt it will be rewritten in Rust any time soon.

GCC was one subject of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The development process was changed to more closely mimic Linux and the original GCC steering committee was dissolved. Cygnus had a big role in GCC becoming an industry fixture for its hayday. Eventually the lack of big revenue meant that the license became an annoyance that industry could deal with by nurturing Clang and LLVM with acceptable quantities of money. In FSF orthodoxy, they were supposed to lose that fight.

Not necessarily. In (my understanding of) FSF orthodoxy the existence of a viable GPL alternative forces the hand of competitors in certain respects. LLVM could never drift towards a more proprietary model and expect to succeed at it so long as GCC remains viable.

"Best" doesn't matter, you just need a seed crystal that's good enough.