nix-direnv VS nonguix

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.

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: