The Nixpkgs core team has unfortunately decided to disband. We’re proud to have had the opportunity to lead by example in bottom‐up, consensus‐focused governance for Nixpkgs, and of our achievements over the past 10 months, including reforming the committer delegation process and onboarding 19 new committers, empowering maintainers by extending the merge bot, re‐establishing contact with GitHub and securing the sponsored Enterprise Cloud upgrade, helping triage GHSA-67f2-674w-6g63 and track the...
Guix does not have that same churn by any stretch, but, would still offer all the wonderful features of NixOS if you are willing to do the work of setting up any packages yourself, that do not already exist, and that is not at all removed from my to do list
One of Guix’s strengths, and one of the things that appeals to me over Nix, is importers:
You can import packages from go, ruby, python, rust, or a few other languages really easily. Just guix import packagerepo and boom you have a package. This makes it significantly easier to get packages from those ecosystems.
Now, Nix has unofficial equivalent functionality… but it’s a mess and spread over 30 different projects, many of which would frustratingly only work with flakes (which are “experimental” and “not officiallly supported” despite the fact their extreme popularity), or only work with channels.
I remember this pain point when trying to import a python package with nix. The only “just works” way of doing it that only worked via channels… and was deprecated, with the repo being archived. There was this new, non deprecated way by the same group of people… that didn’t support a specific feature I needed to get the python package to work. And to the best of my understanding, still doesn’t.
Guix may not move as fast as Nix when it comes to packaging or innovation, but they have a certain “coherency”, where everything is together, integrated, well documented, and guaranteed to work.
One of Guix’s strengths, and one of the things that appeals to me over Nix, is importers:
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-import.html
You can import packages from go, ruby, python, rust, or a few other languages really easily. Just guix import packagerepo and boom you have a package. This makes it significantly easier to get packages from those ecosystems.
Now, Nix has unofficial equivalent functionality… but it’s a mess and spread over 30 different projects, many of which would frustratingly only work with flakes (which are “experimental” and “not officiallly supported” despite the fact their extreme popularity), or only work with channels.
I remember this pain point when trying to import a python package with nix. The only “just works” way of doing it that only worked via channels… and was deprecated, with the repo being archived. There was this new, non deprecated way by the same group of people… that didn’t support a specific feature I needed to get the python package to work. And to the best of my understanding, still doesn’t.
Guix may not move as fast as Nix when it comes to packaging or innovation, but they have a certain “coherency”, where everything is together, integrated, well documented, and guaranteed to work.