Re: Advantages over Nix?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Taylan Kammer <taylan.kammer@gmail.com> skribis:

> This seems to confirm my thought that Guix is actually at a better
> place with things like guix deploy, guix pack, etc. compared to Nix,
> where things are more scattered.  I suppose it's thanks to the
> clean-slate development of Guix... or the developers are just
> geniuses. ;-)

In addition to people being geniuses :-), I think better integration
stems from a common will to have a consistent tool set and from the fact
that we’re using Scheme.

For instance, there’s a first-class notion of “package” in Guix (and
“operating system”, etc.), whereas everything is a “derivation” in Nix.

Thus Guix can provide a clean UI: you can type “hello@2.10” to refer to
version 2.10 of Hello (in Nix one usually has to refer to attribute
sets), there’s a ‘guix search’ command, and so on.

That’s also what allows for search path handling
(~/.guix-profile/etc/profile etc.), for grafts (important if you are to
deliver security updates quickly!), and for “package transformations”:

  https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Package-Transformation-Options.html

But I’m kinda biased, and I know Nix 2.0 is also a great improvement in
terms of UI!

There are all the other aspects that Ricardo’s HN comment and that the
NixCon talk mention, among which the reduced bootstrap and generally
ensuring packages are entirely built from source are big deal
security-wise and freedom-wise.

HTH,
Ludo’.