One thing I didn't find is Guix on servers. I am all-in on NixOS for both my daily driver desktop and couple of servers, and adding more of either will be simple modifications to my flake repository. I really appreciate that simplicity and consistency. Does Guix offer that?

The other thing is package availability: it's amazing on Nix. Plus, they remain relatively fresh on the unstable channel. How's that on Guix?

I'd be curious if a list exists of all declarative Linux distros out there, along with the configuration language (Nix, Scheme, etc.)

I'd also be curious as to how easy it would be to convert Scheme to the Nix language or vice-versa, in other words, it seems to me that there might be a "parent language" (for lack of a better term) out there for all lisplike and functional programming language (a subset of Haskell, F#, or some other functional programming language perhaps) that sort of might act as an intermediary conversion step (again, for lack of a better term!) between one functional or lisplike programming language and another...

Probably unrelated (but maybe somewhat related!) -- consider Pandoc... Pandoc is a Haskell program that basically uses a document tree structure to convert between one type of document format and another... maybe in terms of programming languages you'd call that an AST, an Abstract Syntax Tree... so maybe there's some kind of simplified AST (or something like that) out there that works as the base tree for all functional and lisp-like programming language (yes, lisp/lisplikes sort of preserve its/their own tree; their own AST -- via their intrinsic data structure, and that would seem to be true about functional programming languages too... so what is the base tree/AST of all of these, that all languages in this family can "map on to" (for lack of better terminology), that could be used (with AI / LLM's) as an "Intermediary Language" or "Intermediary Data Structure" (choose your terminology) to allow easily converting between one and the other?

Anyway, if we had that or something like that, then Nix configurations could (in theory) be easily converted to Guix, and vice-versa, automatically, as could any other Linux configured by a functional and/or lisplike language...

That, and I found the article very interesting!

I may have to try Guix in the future!

I've embraced daily shallow clone/fetches and the burden is now mostly just the 2GB of disk space.

It's a bit annoying though that git doesn't make it easier. No one would shallow clone later screw up and download every commit anyway, I feel shallow clone repos should be set up with a different configuration that fully-embraces shallow history (not that the configuration options even exist today AFAIK).

Also flakes: a declarative distro without a flakes equivalent makes little sense to me.

> it didn't take long for me to realize the initial problem that caused my previous install to be unbootable was of course found between the chair and keyboard.

I think we’ve all been there! It still happens to me, exactly 5 seconds after calling Claude/Codex/Gemini names and dismissing their ability to follow instructions.

Probably a typo, unless the author really has 8gigabit network

As a recovering emacs user I had a pretty visceral reaction to seeing a “cons” cell in code. In all my ramblings about a post-syntax world and chasing higher and higher abstractions seeing the level of abstractions of “cons” cells, a linked list implementation detail, mingled in with the orchestration of a whole operating system just feels like a despicable and cruel joke. It’s like studying system design and hearing some peanut brain in the other room say something like “let’s use a for loop” - not the level that one should be thinking at.

Guix potential target IMVHO should be desktop power users, not HPC, NixOS while mostly developed for embedded systems (Anduril) or servers in general still take care of desktops, Guix apparently not and that's a big issue... Nowadays outside academia I doubt there are many GNU/Linux users who deploy on plain ext4...

> With Nix, however, it was a matter of just describing a few packages in a shell and boom, Ruby in one folder, no Ruby (and thus no mess) everywhere else.

This approach was already done by GoboLinux in 2005. And even GoboLinux was by far not the first - versioned AppDirs existed for a long time before; even perl stow enabled that. NixOS just uses a modified variant e. g. via hashed directory names. But I already adopted a similar scheme as GoboLinux did soon after I switched to Linux in 2005 (well 2004 but mostly 2005 as I was still a big noob in 2004 really).

> I started adding shell.nix files to all my little projects

I appreciate that NixOS brought good ideas to Linux here; having reliable snapshots is good. If a user has a problem, someone else might have solved it already, so you could "jump" from snapshot to snapshot. No more need for StackOverflow. The HiveMind took over.

But with all its pros, the thing I hate by far the most in NixOS is .. nix. I think the language is ugly beyond comparison; only shell scripts are uglier. I instead opted for a less sophisticated solution in that ruby acts as the ultimate glue to whatever underlying operating system is used. What I would like is a NixOS variant that is simpler to use - and doesn't come with nix. Why can't I use ruby instead? Or simple config files? I am very used to simple yaml files; all my system description is stored in simple yaml files. Since +20 years. That approach works very well (ruby expands these to any target destination; for instance, I have aliases for e. g. bash, but these are stored in yaml files and from that ruby then generates any desired target format, such as also cmder on Windows and so forth).

> In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme.

I am glad to not be the only one to dislike nix, but boy ... scheme? Aka Lisp? Seriously???

Young people use lisp? I somehow doubt that.

    (cons* (channel
          (name 'nonguix)
          (url "https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix")

Why would users know what cons* does, anyway? That's stupid.

YAML files exist for a reason. Keep. Things. Simple. (I know, I know, many use YAML files in a complex manner with gazillion nested indentation. Well, they are using it in a wrong way, then they complain about how bad yaml is.)

> Since the code is pretty much just Scheme and the different mechanisms available are fairly well documented (see caveat below), the barrier to entry is much lower than with Nix in my opinion.

Can't evaluate this. To me it seems as if NixOS may have changed, but Nix was always a big barrier. I decided to not want to overcome it, since I did not want to be stuck with a horrible language I don't want to use.