Also, a fraction of packages, users and guides.

I think Guix is great, but as a NixOS enthusiast who genuinely wanted to try it out, I gave up in the face of the lack of docs for people who aren't working in lab or have a PhD in computing of some sort.

Also, how is shepherd better than systems? Genuinely curious.

Lastly, I agree Nix is not a very enjoyable language, but scheme doesn't look like a very beginner friendly option either. Could be wrong, I'm not a programmer.

Yah 100% free no thanks. And I actually like systemd.

Is it non-trivial to enable non-free repos?

How do you do Flakes with Guix? That's probably the most important feature Nix has.

Big, ... helpful community

Not sure I would agree with that lol

I've considered it, but i like nix better than scheme, and i need non-free software and kernel, which is doable with non-guix but much more tedious with third party iso's. I went back to Void linux but i still use nix + home manager, and the huge repo alone wins out for me.

I've been eyeing Guix for a while but haven't jumped in yet. Honestly, I feel like I'm finally getting comfortable with nixos and flakes over the years. There's quite a bit of un/relearning to do, and I can't tell if the flow of Guix's channels/inferiors would match the ease of composability that I like with flakes. The lock system really does it for me and I don't like the idea of hunting down refs to pin manually or maintaining my own frankenstein repo (other than my config).

That said, I do use emacs and actually like lisp, so I'm torn right now.

I enjoy lisp and emacs but nothing will convince me to use guix over nixos. At most I guess I would switch to arch and use the guix package manager there.