Not sure I like their definition of declarative. I’d instead say that a config is “declarative” if the result of applying that configuration is independent of the current state of the system.

MacOS

I had a go at using guix as a package manager on top of an existing distro (first an immutable fedora, which went terribly, then OpenSUSE). Gave up for a few reasons:

• As mentioned in the article, guix pull is sloow.
• Packages were very out of date, even Emacs. If I understand correctly, 30.1 was only added last month, despite having been available since February. I get that this isn’t the longest wait, but for the piece of software you can expect most guix users to be running, it doesn’t bode well.
• The project I was interested in trying out (Gypsum) had a completely broken manifest. Seems like it worked on the dev’s machine though, which made me concerned about how well guix profiles actually isolate Dev environments. This was probably an error on the dev’s part, but I’d argue such errors should be hard to make by design.

All in all I love the idea of guix, but I think it needs a bigger community behind it. Of course I’m part of the problem by walking away, but 🤷