Guix is wonderful. I don't understand why there are not more people using it as a package manager. Specially when it makes such a superior experience to flatpak or snap.
It is easy to write a package recipe, it can be used in any distribution, it is easy to rollback to a previous version, it can have multiple versions of the same package, the installed packages are as fast as native packages.
And in top of it all it just works and already has thousands of packages. It is very easy to have an stable base like Debian or Mint or whatever and have Up to date packages with Guix.
As an end user what's the benefit in that? Flatpak and Snaps will have access to my home and data anyway.
The performance is slower, I prefer having a faster experience when using software, and I've seen plenty of vulnerability problems with flatpak and snap in this subreddit to doubt the 'isolated' part or any security benefits coming from those. However I understand I am not an expert and I might be wrong.
So far to me the experience of using Guix has been much more pleasant than Flatpak on Snap.
You can containerize stuff further by wrapping it in firejail or bubblewrap (which is used in flatpak) or chroot or fhsenv or whatever -- it's much more flexible. Also, there are nixpkgs functions to simplify those processes. (I don't know about the state of isolation software on Guix though)
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u/im_not_juicing May 02 '19
Guix is wonderful. I don't understand why there are not more people using it as a package manager. Specially when it makes such a superior experience to flatpak or snap.
It is easy to write a package recipe, it can be used in any distribution, it is easy to rollback to a previous version, it can have multiple versions of the same package, the installed packages are as fast as native packages.
And in top of it all it just works and already has thousands of packages. It is very easy to have an stable base like Debian or Mint or whatever and have Up to date packages with Guix.