Given the direction that the Nix project is going, I suspect that many of you Nix users reading along here are currently considering alternatives, and among them Guix.
Personally I've only been using Nix for a few weeks, so my investment is not that big, but how about you? For a technical comparison, you could start with these two articles. If you're on IRC, I'd also suggest to join #guix just in case or look at the other communication options they endorse on their website.
What gives me the most thoughts is the availability of recent-ish software on Guix; but given Guix's FSF-level copyleft culture there's at least the certainty that whatever efforts I might put in to build and package things myself would have the lowest-possible likelihood of suffering corporate/fashtech capture. And we may be picking up momentum to collectively alleviate those problems.
Yep, I've dabbled in Guix before but was put off by the smaller/more outdated repository (according to repology, it has improved a lot lately but it's still nowhere near nixpkgs) and the official non-support/second-class support for non-FOSS software (which, as much as I try to avoid it, is still a necessity in my day-to-day). The ecossystem being smaller is also an issue, but I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty and contribute some of the glue myself if necessary. Something else is FSF's reliance on mailing lists and IRC; I get sticking with FOSS, obviously, but aren't there more modern/ergonomic FOSS alternatives that suit their needs? The move from Savannah to Codeberg for the repositories was a welcome one and I hope they would follow with the rest of their platform, but oh well.
Regardless, the time has come to make the jump. I can no longer afford to keep supporting a distribution being blatantly hijacked by far-right defense sector actors (for a far-right regime and their far-right allies). I hope Guix will treat me as well as I intend to treat it. :)
And I seriously pray that it is more resilient to hostile takeovers by fascists, since, to my knowledge, there are no other Linux distributions in the "declarative, reproducible, immutable" family/paradigm. It's just NixOS and Guix. So Guix it is. I got too comfortable with the guarantees this model gives me to ever go back to more standard distros, I'm afraid.
Fittingly, just two days ago they did open up a Mastodon account — this one: https://hachyderm.io/@guix. I'd say be sure to boost their initial toot and possibly more.
From an email that just appeared on the devel list:
Perfect timing haha! They might really be capitalizing on leftist/anti-fascist people moving away from NixOS. Regardless, I welcome the move.
There's a monthly Nix meetup in my area, "Nix your bugs". Never been there. I'm currently contemplating showing up there with my NixOS laptop and nix all the bugs (well, replacing them with others) by installing Guix. Given the recent developments, I don't even think most of the people who are there will consider that a dick move.
I'll definitely try to move the people I know who are interested in/users of NixOS over to Guix. Admittedly, there aren't many to begin with haha.