So although it’s inspired by Nix, I personally will chose it as it has evolved quickly and if you look at all three aspects Guix, Guix System and documentation it’s now better than Nix. Also last but not the least I work with emacs lisp, so I feel at home with Guile Scheme so I will prefer Guix over Nix.

Personally I will like Nix also to flourish and being a non GNU project it will be able to provide closed source proprietary packages which is not part of core Guix. I think a healthy competition between the two is good, and whichever gets popular is overall good for advances in OS eco-system. Guix System is a new OS, not just package manager.

But by making Guix package manager available to other systems, it might move people who see benefits to move to transactional, predictable, secure OS like NixOS or Guix System.

Nonetheless, I should definitely get to know the project more, because it was some time ago I tried it last. So, Good luck with the project! :)

Isn't all that also true for Guix?

If so, why do your prefer Nix over Guix?

Guix is based off nix, I have looked at it a few times, but it seems much more complicated and less developed than nix. It's only selling point over nix if that everything is written in guile, which does not matter to me.

I prefer Guix choice of using a real programming language (Scheme!) instead of a DSL, but I really like Nix anyway.

Something that annoys me sometimes is that Nix has a few really bloated packages, compiled with all dependencies on. For example, if I try installing mutt I eventually get python as a dependency. This is a bit ugly. I'm aware it's easy to change this, but I'd still love to get thinner binaries from hydra. Otherwise, a really neat piece of software.

Guix tends to be a bit more like Slackware or Arch. Very vanilla things. I would love if Nix went a bit in that direction too with regards to packaging policies. It's more secure and nicer to humble devices, like cheap Chromebooks.

It's a toss up as to whatever you like. I think Nix has a bigger community, more packages, etc. But Guix, strictly speaking I think, is a 'superset' because changes from Nix often flow into Guix (and Guix can use Nix packages directly), as Guix is built directly on the same source-code as Nix - but not the other way around. There are some other differences, like the fact Guix uses GNU dmd while NixOS uses systemd, etc etc.

It's all just personal preference I think. I use NixOS because it's reliable and has a decently sized community, and a lot of packages. It also has really, really good Haskell support, and being a Haskell developer, that's a pretty big plus to me. Having non-free packages isn't so much of a stickler for me. I think the Guix people are doing good work, though, and a distribution for free software and the GNU project is very important - so I wish them the best even if I'm farther away.

You'd have to try both of them and make a decision for yourself IMO. But I warn you: the rabbit hole is deep, and will require learning. And when you come out - you may be immensely displeased with the current state of affairs. :)

(Full disclosure: IAMA NixOS developer.)

Guix is more elegant in ways such as guile versus nix the dsl, although the haskell underpinning of nix is very useful.

If you're a linux user willing to put in the time and play around then both are perfectly usable as daily drivers but they're both learning experiences as well.

Hard to say which will win out, probably both, with excellent interoperability.

They really are the future of os managment, they simplify abstractions of state and naming

Guix has an excellent CLI and awesome docs. It's stable and plenty usable. All being in one, high-level language like Scheme makes it seems really easy to hack on, and I think that's part of why its CLI is so good already.

Nix is faster, it supports macOS, and its package collection is much bigger because it's older. But Guix seems great to me, too! If you think you might like it, try it.

Whenever I need a disposable environment I reach for lxc/lxd.