nonguix VS nix-direnv

Their software freedom policy seems to be similar to Debian. All free by default, allow separate nonfree addon. In the case of Guix you can find that here: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix .

The GUIX community has a non-free package repo, you just add it as a GUIX channel and problem solved:

https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

Yes, being a GNU project Guix has a strict free software only policy. The biggest channel (repo) with proprietary stuff for Guix is called nonguix. It has the vanilla kernel, Nvidia drivers and a number of other proprietary packages including Steam, Chrome and the like. I don't know what the state of ZFS on Guix is though as I don't care for it myself, but I can see why its inclusion would be questioned with regards to licensing.

Since Guix is a GNU project, it doesn't support proprietary software (Steam, Discord, Zoom...). Third-party repos are available for it.

There's a git lab repo for non-free/libre software that you can add as a channel when installing. I used the following guide that shows you how to do this.

I'm trying to enable substitues for nonguix. I added the code snippet from the nonguix website to my system.scm file per the instructions. When I try to reconfigure I get the following error:

BTW: I personally use direnv with nix-direnv. This basically works by setting your shell with proper tooling when you enter the directory.

I'm not sure what you mean by nix env, maybe you are referring to nix-direnv?

Although currently I'm using direnv + nix-direnv. Keep in mind that direnv has builtin nix support which is very basic and doesn't do any caching. So you still needs this add-on to preserve roots.

I distinguish between system level things and user level things, even though I don't really have different users on my machine. I install the bare minimum number of packages + a lot of different drivers in the configuration.nix, and desktop and editor related things in HM. For development environment, I have environment per project using mkShell and https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv, which allows you to switch to the specific environment once you cd into the directory. (Although I do have python installed globally with some commonly used packages such as numpy, so I can just start python and write something when I need to, without creating an environment)

I further make my software projects so that when I click a link I go into an environment pre-loaded with their dependencies so dropping in/out of projects is always frictionless. I do this with the reproducibility guarantees of nix, along with glue like nix-direnv and envrc-mode to direnv.

(I also use nix-direnv)

direnv

Personally I use nix-direnv. No longer the need to run nix develop or nix-shell. By setting up a .envrc with either use nix or use flake it will automatically install all the packages from default/shell.nix or flake.nix

Direnv is installed using the nix-direnv installation instructions under "Via configuration.nix in NixOS". I read some recommendations that envrc.el is a better alternative then direnv.el, and after some testing I have to agree. (envrc-global-mode) is enabled in my config. This works perfectly with a normal emacs instance.