Also, I can unterstand if companies are hating it which just want to have a free ride and monetize efforts of other people. But for users, there are many many other options and distributions available. Why not chose one that matches your need better?

Why get mad about people comparing nix and guix, in a thread comparing nix and guix? Pointing out legitimate disadvantages is not hating. Maybe get off the internet for a bit and touch grass.

It has top-priority goals like reproducibility, capability to inspect and verify all source code, and providing a fully free system that is not compatible with providing nonfree binary blobs.

So does nix, nobody is forcing you to opt-in into non-free packages. And guix most certainly is compatible with non-free blobs, as that’s how most people are using it. The only difference is that nix is supporting non-free packages instead of banning even talking about them.

This

I use Guix as my “default” distro because I value software-freedom and reproducibility. It fits my needs very well, and I make sure to buy hardware that works with it instead of expecting it to work with whatever I throw at it. For my Windows gaming machine I use PopOS as the replacement OS instead of trying to beat Guix into serving that purpose, because PopOS is better suited for that role, and I have different expectations for it.

It’s okay if something doesn’t meet your needs, that doesn’t make it bad, just means it’s not the right thing for you. There’s like hundreds of distros for Windows gamers, let us free software zealots have ours too please.

(And don’t get me wrong, Unix shells are great if you want to save on extra keys pressed in a terminal session. But there are reasons that the shell languages are not often used in larger programs.)

I agree with your overall point, that having a single consistent functional language for package descriptions and build scripts is a great thing, and that bash is awful, but your reasoning is somewhat flawed. The main drawbacks of bash are somewhat rectified in Nix because bash is very much contained/sandboxed, which prevents arbitrary damage to the system, and there are some nice defaults in stdenv too.

The Guile version supports a more powerful functionality, which is that evaluation of a package can have several extra results (called outputs). It is over a year that I read about that in the Guix documentation and yet I recognize it immediately.

Nix also supports multiple outputs (in fact this is where the concept of outputs in Guix came from)

the code tells me that it is removing examples.

You could also do that with Nix in an easier and more declarative fashion, either by adding a comment, or by doing this:

postInstallPhases = [ "removeExamplesPhase" ];
removeExamplesPhase = ''
  rm -f "$out"/lib/{basic-server,helloworld,postcollector}
'';

Scheme has much safer and more robust string handling. The code will not do harmful things if a file name contains white space or happens to be equal to ‘echo a; rm -rf /etc/*’.

Bash is just two double quotes away from doing this too. See code above for an example

Scheme strings handle Unicode well

Bash also handles Unicode well

If there is an error, it will not be silently ignored as is the norm in shell scripts which are not written by experts, but will throw it.

Nixpkgs stdenv sets set -eu which has a similar effect. If that code fails, the entire build will fail too.

the code has less redundancy. For example, the bash version mentions three times the subfolder “lib”, the Guile version only once. This makes it easier to refactor the code later.

This is also really quite easy to rectify in bash, see code above.