Guix greatly simplifies things. Like others said for Nix, I really would recommend managing things declaratively in your system config and a manifest file, but the basic cli isn't bad.

guix install ranger

guix remove ranger

guix pull

guix upgrade

guix search ranger

These basics just work how you'd expect last I checked. There is some `guix shell` stuff as well, but I don't use it, so won't be able to say much about it.