Re: a first question about parallel environments

[John Soo]

Hi Ben,

Welcome.

> But can guix also be helpful in a case where you have multiple different 
> environments (I hope the term is correct) running in parallel? What is the 
> best way to achieve that? Creating multiple users? Using containers?

Certainly!  This is one of the main benefits of a functional package manager.  
Environments, as you call them, are called profiles in guix or nix. They are 
comprised of a set of symlinks and env vars and other computed things pointing 
to the store. Those links are meant to be understood by shells or other tools 
the user or system would use (like $PATH).

By default each user has their own profile.  Moreover, you can use guix 
environment to create a one-off profile from a file, the dependencies of a 
package, or from specified ad-hoc lists of packages. I suggest giving that a 
try! There are even options to run your environment in a container.  The docs 
are quite good for guix environment so I would give them a read. 

I find this idea of profiles still quite tantalizing and of further use than it 
has now. We have yet a lot more to get out of this deployment approach.

Good luck!

John