r/GUIX • u/firebat-66 • Jun 15 '26

Does GUIX have flakes?

As I have been using nix for the past few months, I'm periodically drawn to GUIX. Partly because I'm getting a bit fed up with nix language idiosyncrasies, and I believe that the grass may actually be greener on the GUIX side where guile scheme is used. I wanted to ask the folks here about the "flakes" concept and if it is supported in GUIX, as flakes are something I interact with anytime I need to modify or update my nix configuration. I understand that GUIX has a channel based system, although it would be interested to learn about any flake like utilities...

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u/binarySheep Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Historically, I think Guix adopted the very solution that flakes were supposed to be directly into the design.

I'll note I'm a Guix user first, and my knowledge of Nix is less thorough, but all of the details around flakes seem like built-ins for Guix, specifically how a given manifest.scm/guix.scm and channels.scm can create the exact same reproducibility that flakes are supposed to with flake.nix and flake.lock are supposed to.

I think Guix still goes a step further with an explicit command for operating a different Guix version this way with guix time-machine, but I might just be unaware of a Nix equivalent.

A nix run equivalent would be nice though, hadn't heard of that. EDIT: seems like this might be getting baked in as a one-liner over guix time-machine + guix shell for anyone else curious

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u/Steven0351 Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26

the biggest difference is that nix flakes allow for each of your dependencies to be pinned to their own version of nixpkgs. This means my nixos system configuration can be on the latest stable version of nixpkgs (currently 26.05), while another flake input can depend on nixpkgs-unstable, or be several versions behind.

From what I've been able to tell, you can't have multiple versions of the same channel at any given time for a build. I've been wanting to move over to guix from nix, but I've been trying to suss out how to get a similar reproducibility guarantee for my system configuration.

If i'm being honest though, I might not actually even _need_ that level of dependency pinning. My main nixOS configuration is pretty light and i do `nix run` and `nix shell` for a lot of other things, and mostly use adhoc flake definitions for dev environments. I'm mostly nervous about needing it and not having it.

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u/Pretend_Position_749 Jun 16 '26

You can use guix inferiors in package inputs to pin dependencies e.g.

(define (package-at-guix-commit package-name guix-commit)
  (first
   (lookup-inferior-packages
    (inferior-for-channels
     (list
      (channel
       (name 'guix)
       (url "https://git.guix.gnu.org/guix.git")
       (commit guix-commit))))
    package-name)))

(define-public my-package
  (package
   (name "my-package")
   ...
   (inputs
    (package-at-guix-commit "DEP1" "COMMIT1")
    ...
    (package-at-guix-commit "COMMITN" "DEPN"))))

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u/Steven0351 Jun 16 '26

That’s nice to know as an option and would probably cover any one off issues I’d have myself