Try #guix on Debian as a package manager: this will let you figure out if the packages you need are there.
I really like the shell feature of Guix: you can very easily deploy virtual environments for any language/tool--think of Docker without any of the complexities.
If one wants Docker without the complexities, there are Toolbx or, even better, Distrobox. The are images optimized to be toolboxes based on every major distro, so you can in practice mix multiple distros together and access all of their packages.
For better collaboration on the same project, there is an implementation of so called Dev Containers named DevPod.
@passthejoe Huge factors are use cases and background. With a handful of systems and existing Linux experience, it really is a tough sell.
It was a more straight forward sell for me, coming in from macOS & development, wanting something sturdy, yet flexible, for a handful of machines, a small fleet of service VMs, and cross-platform dev flows.
Over the years I've seen a lot of Linux folk bounce off NixOS hard - often frustrated by the ways traditional Linux distro experience is not applicable.
@AngryAnt I think the Guix documentation is pretty good. You don't see that volume of docs in most projects, and it definitely exceeds the bar for quantity. Quality is not bad, either.
For me the key is: Are enough people using the system, solving their problems and then sharing their solutions?
@passthejoe This pretty much hits one nail on the head: configuration is programming. Not scripting, but real, hard, software engineering coding.
This is why I started the #nu_2 project. But it is early days and there is a long way to go. https://rdmp.org/nu-2.
The way I see things panning out is that #Guix will be the plumbing, the wholesale system, and user-friendlier versions will appear which provide a layer of porcelain over it, the consumer system, like Zorin over Debian for example.
@passthejoe I've tried using Guix a few times. It makes a lot of sense to me as a system you can spin up by specifying a few parameters in a deployment management script. It seems less suited for a personal desktop system that I'd work with daily.
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