 Just gave a short introductory talk about Guix for the Software Sustainability SIG of the Netherlands eScience Center, following an introduction to Nix. The audience doesn’t use either tool so far so now I’m curious to know if they’ll want to leave CONDA & co. for Guix or Nix! 12 comments
 @janneke Someone used to CONDA, apt, and whatnot may view Nix and Guix, from a distance, as “similar”. It’s only when getting closer that one starts to appreciate the differences. The first difference one might notice is ease of use (or perceived ease of use). @civodul @janneke I think it has also a lot to do with your prior exposure to functional programming, I like to think that Nixlang is more a very simple barebone Haskell whereas Guix enjoys Lispy ecosystem. Also, I think learning Guix or Nix is a very open-ended question :) — I suppose that people don't think of learning everything there is to learn but learning towards objective X. For example, not everyone has to learn about the bootstrap machinery of any tool they use. @civodul Having experimented with both Nix and Guix recently, I personally feel like Guix is more approachable because it uses a Scheme EDSL instead of inventing its own language. However, I also had prior experience with Scheme which likely gave me a head start on Guix. Probably hard to come up with an “objective answer” though… I've also had a better time learning Guix. I think Guix is more approachable than Nix - not only because it's based on a programming language with simpler semantics - but because they've put more time into their documentation and included more tools into into the default ecosystem. IE `guix home`. However, I feel that Nix has focused on meeting the developer where they are at. We can see this because I think they differ in the developer experience in two important ways. They've leaned heavily into `devShells` with having various shell hooks and being able to set environment variables. And they support a wider array of systems. I like working on MacOS, so being able to use Nix to _easily_ manage my dev environments is what ultimately made me side with Nix. The devShell enhancements might exist in Guix; I just never found it when I was playing with it. The other thing that I think Guix could beat Nix is autocomplete. I think Guix could more easily support systems like LSP, making writing these systems much easier. @civodul with no hard evidence to back this up, but as a former guix user who now use nix, I'd say that learning nix has been hardest. Buuuuuuuuut if we include GNU shepherd I think it evens out. |
Gregory's Server
“Of Nix and Guix, which has the steepest learning curve?”, someone asked.
I replied that from the start we tried hard to make Guix approachable, more than the Nix I contributed to back then, also adding facilities like command-line transformation options… but that I’m biased.
I wonder what an objective answer would be. Anyone? :-)