Probably the definitive document making the case for Nix (and Guix by extension) is Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis [0] . The introduction is a good read by itself.

Probably the definitive document making the case for Nix (and Guix by extension) is Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis [0] . The introduction is a good read by itself. I have never used Guix/GuixSD but have heard good things about it. Behind the scenes it uses the Nix package manager and offers a subset of Nix packages licensed as free software. Whereas Nix/NixOS uses the Nix expression language, Guix/GuixSD uses a Guile Scheme front-end. I've heard the Guix CLI is quite nice and a bit more polished than Nix's but Nix is currently in the process of overhauling the CLI. See [1] for a more detailed comparison. Both of these projects have very active development but don't have the volume of listings as you would find in e.g. AUR or the Debian repos. That said, I've been pleased and actually surprised at just how many packages exist. If you can't find what you want, contributing new packages isn't too hard (often just a case of finding something similar in the repos and changing the relevant values). You can check the current Nix [2] and Guix [3] packages here to see if enough of your needs are covered before giving one of them a try. [0] http://grosskurth.ca/bib/2006/dolstra-thesis.pdf http://grosskurth.ca/bib/2006/dolstra-thesis.pdf [1] http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-nix-and-gnu-guix.html http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-nix-and-gnu-... [2] https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html [3] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/