Having once spent a happy afternoon browsing the Guile info pages, but otherwise pretty unfamiliar with it, this seems to realize a lot of the promise that Guile has had from the beginning. Specifically, the idea that the language that ties together the GNU operating system is not C or bash, but Guile Scheme. A language that can do very low level stuff and GUI development and be used for scripting, empowering the users of a capital-F Free operating system that's hackable all the way down. That's my impression anyway. As I said, this is mostly gleaned from the Guile info pages, but I was impressed by the consistency of that vision with the GNU project's overall goals.

Same here...as a NixOS user, I really wish it used scheme instead of the nix language.

However, I do like the pragmatic nature of NixOS (you're able to easily install non-free packages). GUIX doesn't make this easy at all from what I understand. I appreciate those virtues, but practically speaking, I have to use non-free software on the desktop all the time.

Guix does have the capacity to add 'channels', e.g. https://gitlab.com/mbakke/guix-chromium , so while non-free software while never be part of the distribution itself, it could be done unofficially. Also, you can run the Nix standalone on top of GuixSD, so you could run GuixSD and then use Nix to install whatever's missing.

> you could run GuixSD and then use Nix to install whatever's missing.

How much cooperation between the two is necessary? If I wanted to install CUDA drivers with Nix would it "just work" (i.e. if it works on NixOS it works on GuixSD) or could GuixSD make problems?

I found a comment from a year ago claiming that the kernel wouldn't load blobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14630581

I'm not certain about CUDA drivers and whether this sort of thing work "just work" via the Nix package manager on GuixSD. That sounds like you might need to recompile kernel headers or the like.

Re: the comment about the Guix kernel and blobs: Guix uses the linux-libre kernel which has blobs removed. BUT you can use a custom kernel on Guix, so you could use a blobby kernel, but you would have to configure it. If you poke around, you can find examples of people doing this, e.g.: https://gist.github.com/TeMPOraL/306bbb7c627ab0d32fa84af8319...

But, in general, the standalone Nix package manager (and the standalone Guix package manager, for that matter) are designed to work as isolated units, not depending as much on the 'host' system, so lots of stuff does 'just work' regardless of whether the host distro is GuixSD or Debian or Void or Arch or whatever.

If you have a Guix package definition for CUDA then you can install it. There's no need to use Nix when Guix can be easily extended.

I'd like to understand this as well. It's a viable option for me if it truly works.

Do you have more detail/instructions on running Nix on GuixSD?

Just install the standalone Nix installer like you would on any other (non-Nix) distro (see this part of the Nix manual: https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#chap-quick-start ). Both Guix and Nix are designed to work on top of 'foreign' distros, and this includes using a standalone Nix package manager on GuixSD and a standalone Guix package manager on NixOS (or both the standalone Guix package manager and the standalone Nix package manager on top of Arch Linux, etc. etc.)