guix-installer VS nickel-nix

I've been using Guix for a bit over 2 months at this point and honestly the whole 'non-free' software thing has not been an issue in the slightest. Use the System Crafters installation iso [1] to get around driver issues on install, and then the only time I've ever had the system complain to me was it warning me one of my hardware components wouldn't work (which it did, since the System Crafters ISO uses the standard Linux kernel). Afterwards, just add nonguix (and I even added Nix as well, so I get the best of both worlds!) If a package isn't in Guix and I don't want to make a package definition, I simply pull it using Nix home-manager. May not be the best or 'proper' setup, but I find it works well enough. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/SystemCrafters/guix-installer/releases

[2]: https://g.stationery.lol/ryan77627/guix-dotfiles

You can try with: https://github.com/SystemCrafters/guix-installer/releases/tag/v202201150226

As for hardware compability, worry not! There's Nonguix! A bunch of nonfree packages including firmware and drivers for Guix! There's also an ISO image of it and even a nice Nonguix installation guide video by David/System Crafters.

There's also a community image (iso) of it made by System Crafters here.

If you need a nonguix installation image, check out the prebuilt one by System Crafters

I used the installation wizard from this image: https://github.com/SystemCrafters/guix-installer/

Have you tried https://github.com/nickel-lang/nickel-nix ?

I didn't use it yet, but looks like this supposed to do it.

These days those aren't the only options; you can also use Nickel: https://github.com/nickel-lang/nickel-nix

Which isn't fully baked, no, but here's hoping.

One target-use case of Nickel is to be used as an alternative front-end for Nix (instead of Nix expressions). There is a draft RFC and a repository to use Nickel to write development shell (Nixel). The goal is that, one day, you can actually just transparently call to Nix code and into Nixpkgs. Until then, I totally understand that nothing can be the power of levering Nixpkgs... so your approach makes sense :)

Undecided; see https://github.com/nickel-lang/nickel-nix for a proof-of-concept of an integration that requires making no changes to either Nickel or Nix.