@civodul i finally managed to give this a whirl over the last week, and it's very promising. however! the experience on my old desktop was pretty bad. it had to update its channels and rebuild guix's derivation *three* times each for "system build" and "system reconfigure", so it took well over an hour.

but this large annoyance hides a proper bug: since you have to be root to run "system reconfigure" and because that will trigger three separate channel updates and guix rebuilds over a potentially long period of time, it has a high likelihood leave behind root-owned files in the guix cache, requiring manual intervention to fix.

it's a promising start to a vision of being able to easily layer channels on bare guix, but the current implementation needs to stop constantly pulling channels and rebuilding guix. honestly, i don't think anything should ever pull guix except "guix pull". i assume there was some nasty thorn that made you have to do it this way?