However, it was designed to be more hackable and easy to inspect, which is facilitated by the fact that it's integrated in a general-purpose language.
As an example, that allows the `guix system` to verify properties before you deploy a system: that the config does not refer to non-existing file systems, that the initrd doesn't lack modules needed to mount the root file system, that there are no references to undefined system services, etc.
Another big difference is that the relation between services in Guix is explicit, as can be seen above. Conversely, a NixOS service can modify anything in the whole system config, which can make it harder for users to understand how the final config came to be.
Side effect (NixOS users will understand): someone writing a Guix service doesn't have to worry about `mkIf` and other contrived constructs, they won't even have to care about fixed points and infinite recursion. :-)
The OS configuration of Guix is declarative, like that of NixOS:
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Using-the-Configura...
However, it was designed to be more hackable and easy to inspect, which is facilitated by the fact that it's integrated in a general-purpose language.
As an example, that allows the `guix system` to verify properties before you deploy a system: that the config does not refer to non-existing file systems, that the initrd doesn't lack modules needed to mount the root file system, that there are no references to undefined system services, etc.
Inspectability is best illustrated here:
https://notabug.org/civodul/guix-explorer
Another big difference is that the relation between services in Guix is explicit, as can be seen above. Conversely, a NixOS service can modify anything in the whole system config, which can make it harder for users to understand how the final config came to be.
Side effect (NixOS users will understand): someone writing a Guix service doesn't have to worry about `mkIf` and other contrived constructs, they won't even have to care about fixed points and infinite recursion. :-)