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Maybe it would be nice to have a wiki style page for this... anyway, I can only offer a perspective from the Guix side of things, but these are the reasons I'd

Maybe it would be nice to have a wiki style page for this... anyway, I can only offer a perspective from the Guix side of things, but these are the reasons I'd personally be cautious about using Nix/Nixpkgs. I believe a higher proportion of Nixpkgs don't build all or some of the software/artifacts from source. I picked a random example, JOSM. The nixpkgs package definition is quite short [1], but I don't think it's actually building the software? The Guix package definition is much longer [2] but I think that's because it's actually building the software from source. 1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/misc/josm/default.nix#L44 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio... 2: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/geo.scm?id=8b00728144d0e4bbc740e1595c85f0ecee3f6fb0#n1163 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages... Personally, I like binary packages, which is why I use Guix, but I also value the security and flexibility of having these packages actually build the software from source. Nixpkgs also contains non-free software. This is sort of related to the previous point, as it's much harder to tell if software is free or not if you're not building it from source, but Guix everything should be free software which takes away a worry when using it. With nixpkgs, I believe there are some bits of non-free software that are marked as such, but not taking a strong stance on attempting to build everything from source makes me generally unsure about the quality assurance in this area.

rudolph9 6y ago
All good points but it’s worth noting that in order to install any non-free NixOS packages there is an explicit flag you need to set which affect their entire OS or set of packages on your machine. That said, downloading a jar instead of compiling the jar from source is definitely a notable difference and potentially is unfree software despite the license stating otherwise and the flag previously mentioned set. While there is nothing inherent about NixOS To prevent non-free software from entering the ecosystem, there is also nothing inherent to Guix either that would prevent any non-free software. Ultimately it comes down to community curation of the packages and while Guix almost definitely is more vigilant about free software both have focus on free-software NixOS has the option to install non-free (which you need to explicitly enable to install non-software) and Guix is more strict where their official packages don’t intentionally support any non-free software and they employ practices that are more likely to catch oversights.

rudolph9 6y ago

All good points but it’s worth noting that in order to install any non-free NixOS packages there is an explicit flag you need to set which affect their entire OS or set of packages on your machine. That said, downloading a jar instead of compiling the jar from source is definitely a notable difference and potentially is unfree software despite the license stating otherwise and the flag previously mentioned set. While there is nothing inherent about NixOS To prevent non-free software from entering the ecosystem, there is also nothing inherent to Guix either that would prevent any non-free software. Ultimately it comes down to community curation of the packages and while Guix almost definitely is more vigilant about free software both have focus on free-software NixOS has the option to install non-free (which you need to explicitly enable to install non-software) and Guix is more strict where their official packages don’t intentionally support any non-free software and they employ practices that are more likely to catch oversights.