GNU Guix is an open source and freely distributed software project that has been designed from the ground up to implement a universal package manager for GNU/Linux systems, allowing anyone to install, update and remove software from their computers.
It is also a standalone distribution of Linux that can be deployed to a USB flash drive, so you can boot it and install it on your computer. The package management functionality of GNU Guix is a derived from the innovative Nix package manager and uses Guile.
Features of the package manager
The application comes with several features, among which we can mention support for transactional upgrades, support for rollbacks, per-user profiles, unprivileged package management, as well as garbage collection.
In addition, it provides users with a unique tool for managing the configuration files of their GNU/Linux operating systems. Being based on the Nix project, the software borrows its low-level mechanisms and combines it with Guile Scheme programming interfaces.
Features of the operating system
The standalone GNU Guix distribution is distributed as a tar archive, which must be written on a USB flash drive of 1GB or higher capacity, supporting both i686 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) machines. Additionally, the system can also be deployed on top of an existing GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el.
However, please note that it’s in heavy development and it doesn’t yet feature a graphical installer or desktop environment. Users must install the operating system from the command-line. It also doesn’t offer support for LVM (Logical Volume Manager), nor out-of-the-box support for system services. However, it comes with over 1,000 packages.
