I'll make an analogy that hopefully won't earn me flames. It's possible to install Guix as an "extra" package manager a bit like Brew in the OS X world, which i

I'll make an analogy that hopefully won't earn me flames. It's possible to install Guix as an "extra" package manager a bit like Brew in the OS X world, which is done by essentially git-clone'ing the sources and building it in user land. Instructions are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Installation.html#Installation https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Installat... . Basically you end up with your Linux system as before, plus Guix now managing packages installed in /gnu/store, which are made accessible via your $PATH. It is therefore relatively simple to try it out that way and blow it all away if you decide it sucks. Otherwise, the images you talk about are for booting a full live system (the Guix OS if you will) which uses Guix as its package manager. This allows you to play around with it and/or install it. This works quite well in a virtual machine such as qemu.