It's not the slowness of releases, it's the fact they don't release any stable version with just security fixes. They only make new cumulative releases. Debian's model is to fix a version for their release and do security patches on that, not to push out the latest version.

I would guess this is the same reason why one can't change git repo history without affecting people working with the repo. Merkle tree all over the store.

Merkle trees don't prohibit release / patch-only branches. Or multiple heads in general.

What do you mean by "Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work."

Like, as a user downloading packages, or a person packaging an application?

As a user downloading a package, it's been super easy for me and it's been years of running Guix with little to no issue (yet the benefits of rolling release, rollbacks, installing multiple versions of a given software etc.).

As for using it to package an application, I found the challenges mainly in the documentation. This was years ago and a lot of work has gone into improving the docs.

I'm curious what your experience has been.

FWIW, not the OP but doing a guix pull after getting it from APT took several hours to crash out every time I wanted to just try using guix for something, and the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild. I put a couple days into it and never actually got to try it.

It's hard to have an opinion of a platform you haven't used but based on how bloated just starting it seemed to be I was unimpressed.

> the ISO to install it from upstream was multiple gigabytes which seemed wild.

For the record, the Guix System install media is less than 1 GB. And the Guix installer from upstream looks to be 100 MB right now.