I can point out that Guix uses Guile, a scheme, something someone may already know before using Guix, but I think a more interesting perspective is that of the

I can point out that Guix uses Guile, a scheme, something someone may already know before using Guix, but I think a more interesting perspective is that of the simple user. What Guix and Nix give you are a package manager that can be used with a signature distro or installed upon another distro, and that package manager makes an effort to be the last package manager you'll need. Both of them are packaging the normal types of programs you'd expect, but also emacs packages, vim plugins, python packages, rust packages, go packages, and so on. Nearly every guix upgrade I do shows me that a bunch of new r-foo packages (R-lang stuff) got packaged. The way I see it, with enough time and manpower, these package managers will have just about everything you'd ever need (exceptions for things like proprietary software, mainly in the case of guix, although these can and do still exist in unofficial channels). Even in their current state they are good enough at doing this that I'm able to get all my emacs packages from the package manager and not use elpa/melpa at all. This also gives you rollbacks for free. If an emacs plugin breaks, you can roll back to a previous generation, and optionally do a partial upgrade to then re-upgrade everything except that broken package. This process is basically instant as it's just moving some symlinks around in the store. You can also have multiple versions of programs installed without issues, and until you do garbage collection, you likely do by default. Declarative package manager is also cool even as a regular user. If you choose to use a guix manifest to manage your user's packages, you have a good visual of everything you've intentionally installed on your system (not cluttered up with the deps they pulled in), and you can easily add/remove them with a text editor + re-running a command afterward to reapply the manifest. I don't consider myself a programmer, and I have not built packages for most distros (I have made a guix package or two locally with some help, but never submitted them upstream), so I thought my perspective as someone using these tools may be valuable. I wouldn't say I ever learned the nix lang or guile to any sort of level of fluency. I basically treat a configuration.nix or config.scm the same way I treat my sway config, neovim config, and so on. The syntax is a little complicated, but the community is there to help, and there's also the documentation. I just know enough to get by as a regular user and I still greatly appreciate guix.