Maybe a better design. Bet? Not so sure. Guix is Betamax to Nix's VHS.

I wouldn’t call it that way. Nix has a better design, but a worse UX. On its own, this would make Guix win.

But VHS is apt, in the way that matters most: the number of apt package maintainers is staggeringly larger than even both combined. More maintainers mean two things:

1. If you want to install something, it has a one-liner install with much higher probability.

2. If you have a bug, or the package has a security flaw fixed upstream, updating your system will yield the version that fixes that with much higher likelihood.

I try to use Guix alongside APT (because using only Guix is tying two hands behind your back). But:

• The shared objects management (libc and the like) is a pain with no guidance; APT binaries expect the .so somewhere, while Guix binaries expect it somewhere else.

• What remains as usable are self-contained binaries, which are frequently severely out of date. For instance, I had installed the fish shell with Guix, but by now an APT-installed binary that detects fish assumes a more recent version than what Guix offers, causing errors. The Guix community cannot figure out why upgrading the fish package trips up some tests fast enough to keep up with APT: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/51064

What a bad analogy. Betamax was superior to vhs.

Betamax was superior to VHS, but it lost to VHS because you could record an entire football game on one VHS tape. GNU is football games in this metaphor, because the GNU+obsession that Guix has is what is really holding it back from wider success.

Nix/NixOS is kinda shit, but at least you can easily run closed source software on it.

You can easily add channels in Guix to install nonfree software, e.g. Steam. I don't even have to do a Nix-style `allowUnfree`.

Why is it bad? that is my point. Guix has several design features that improve over Nix, but a much smaller user base.

Yes and yet it failed. That's what GP is saying: Guix may well be better, but it is even less popular than Nix and thus at (greater) risk of dying.

I don’t think GUIX will ever die, it seems to be the GNU Foundation’s favorite. It’s the only GNU-approved distro whose website is a sub domain of gnu.org. GNU seems to be unofficially standardizing on GUIX.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

https://guix.gnu.org/

There is no GNU foundation. The reason why there is guix.gnu.org is because we asked the GNU sysadmins to delegate the DNS record to our own server. Any other GNU package can do that, and some have.

Guix is certainly not favoured by those who see themselves as leading the "project".

GNU is hardly even a project in the traditional sense.

Guix on the other hand is.