Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree, but the main benefit nix has over guix is some amount of MacOS compatibility. I don’t currently use a Mac, but I know that next time I have to use one for work, my home-manager-mediated config, which contains almost all of my user-specific configuration, will port right over just fine. The guix team doesn’t seem particularly interested in supporting MacOS, and I can’t blame them. The other benefit…
I have had NixOS as my daily driver for nearly three years now and maintain a small number of packages in Nixpkgs. From my perspective, macOS support is a headache as it all of the sudden may require you to debug on a proprietary OS that you lack access to and that runs on two different hardware architectures in order to get a patch accepted. I am probably not going to make any friends for saying so, but I would much…
That's a high price to pay.
Look, the GNU project means different things to different people.
On of the goals of the GNU project is to give users the tools to liberate themselves from arbitrary restrictions. The Hurd pretty much does away with the concept of an all-powerful root user as the only privileged account to alter settings such as network, file system virtualization, drivers, etc.
Emacs is designed to be a collection of extensions; the Emacs paper makes it a point to show that Emacs brings programming to people who aren't traditionally seen (nor see themselves) as programmers.
Guile was designed to be the extension language for every part of the GNU system that was still constrained by the dead systems programming language C.
Likewise, Guix aims to give “end users” control over their software environments and systems, privileges that used to be reserved for the sysadmin class. All design decisions in Guix are aimed at extending privileges to users: package transformations, package inheritance, building packages from JSON descriptions for those averse to Scheme, per-user channels, time machine, an extensive API to build and export systems, virtual machines, containers, environments, etc.
That's what I feel the GNU project stands for, and that's why I work on it and claim the name despite the PR problems that some GNU contributors keep producing.
> you have to buy into the entire FSF philosophy
Hell no! I don't donate to the FSF, I'm not affiliated with the FSF. The FSF has no say on what happens with Guix (and when I was co-maintainer and rms tried to tell us to remove clang from the package collection we told him we disagree and that was that). Guix abides by the Free System Distribution Guidelines, which were published by the FSF. This means that Guix does not come with proprietary software by default.
Guix makes it trivial to add the nonguix repo (or any other repo for that matter): just add it to your channels and run `guix pull`. Now you've got the vanilla kernel and firmware packages and whatnot. You can chat about it all you like on #nonguix. We just ask to keep discussions of proprietary software out of the main channels. Doing that anyway is not "heresy" (I'm sick and tired of the religious vocabulary being applied to people who work on replacing proprietary software with free software) but just ... rude, I guess.
So, I welcome you to sample that greener grass up close. It might pale a little when you're debugging, but at least you get to use Scheme.