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Guix is basically an open source focused variant of Nix, with a few different design decisions. It's also considerably less popular than Nix, which is already

• Roark66 4y ago
  The main difference between guix and nix(other than ideology) is the language used to define the packages. Nix uses its own language, guix uses guile(compatible with scheme). Many people will find the nix language a lot more readable and easy to learn, but one may argue scheme/guie is a more general purpose language. It has been in existence for a long time. As such it has a large number of libraries, editing tools and it is easier to do stuff without having to resort to third party tools and scripts. Therefore in the long run guile (for one that learns it well) will prove more useful. I have to admit I'm not 100% convinced by the argument. I've been learning guile for a couple of weeks and I just start to "get it". Compared with other languages I learned the difficulty with guile was many many times more (for various reasons). I now see it as a pretty powerfull language, but not without many faults. The above notwithstanding I think something like Guix/Nix will become really popular when a truly easy for beginners to learn and powerfull language is used (such as python for example). Perhaps it would be an interesting project to attempt to auto-translate guix from guile into python. I can definitely see it takeoff then.