There are no other official channels, but a bunch of people have their own channels with additional packages. The most popular is probably nonguix (https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix) which provides some popular nonfree packages.
Creating a recipe is generally easy (it's just a bunch of metadata) and even easier if it's supported by one of the importers (python, perl, emacs, ...). You can use guix on any other Linux system if you're not ready to install the complete system. The only difference is that your system is not managed by guix, and you can't run "guix system reconfigure", but the experience is otherwise the same. Make sure to follow the additional steps from the manual.
- slack
- kubectl
- terraform
- azure-cli
- cscope
There have been a several other missing tools for personal use that I just ended up packaging and sharing upstream. For the ones listed above, though, I just haven't gotten around to it, so I let Nix fill in the gap, hehe. FWIW, Guix already has Nix packaged and available as a service, so having parallel stores is really straightforward.
Debian also used to do this until Mozilla changed their tune on a few things. Debian's version and Icecat both used to be named IceWeasel, though, making fun of Mozilla.
But as of now, it lacks some basic stuff like KDE suit. The nonguix channel AFAIK doesn't have binary builds so you'll be building quite a few packages yourself. Using nonguix also means you can't expect support in official support channels. Just something to know before you start.
If this is true, it is a deal breaker for me. I try to buy open source hardware when I can, but even systems like the Pinebook Pro will have their functionality significantly limited by the absence of the linux-firmware package. It is a simple fact that most common WiFi chipset require non-free firmware.
nonguix channel AFAIK doesn't have binary builds so you'll be building quite a few packages yourself
Edit: I'm not sure if I'm reading this right, but the job says 0 builds (eg. https://mirror.brielmaier.net/eval/97958?status=succeeded&pa...). I'm not familiar with how guix works, but where can I see list of actual built derivations for a particular job?
Guix, on the other hand, is better suited for the more adventurous folks. It's built on Scheme, which many find appealing.
Both Nix and Guix can be installed on other Linux distros. Both are now available in the official Debian repository. Additionally, Nix supports macOS quite well. It even supports FreeBSD and Cygwin too, although it's probably not as mature.
As a user who occasionally makes my own packages for software deployment, I can learn very quickly how to write a package description by grepping through the guix main repo and looking at how other packages are written. That's probably similar for Nix, but it's something that I found refreshingly clean and flat in guix and I'm frankly hooked.
Considering I have all my daily use software already installed in Arch, if I attempted to re-install them with Guix in parallel, would that lead to namespace collisions? (i.e. would I have to uninstall currently installed software before I re-install them with Guix?)
Here you go: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Binary-Installation...
> if I attempted to re-install software with Guix in parallel, would that lead to namespace collisions?
It shouldn't. That's one thing Guix (and Nix) excel at: packages only refer to specific versions of their inputs, so you can even install multiple versions of the same package at once if you want.
In terms of Guix shadowing packages installed by Arch, you can put $HOME/.guix-profile either at the front or the end of your $PATH depending on whether you want to prioritize Guix or Arch packages. When I was getting my feet wet with Guix, I ran Guix on top of Gentoo (doing basically what you suggested, gradually shadowing Gentoo packages with Guix ones) for a few months without any significant problems.
Could I ask you to compare guix and portage? I'm not an expert in either, but it looks like guix provides very similar source builds with easier binary caching/substitution.
Namespacing in this case is just adding the guix bin directory to your PATH; put it in front of your existing path to default to guix programs, or at the end to default to Arch. You can also just use an ad-hoc environment (https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-envir...) to call guix packages at will without really installing them.