Dissecting Guix, Part 1: Derivations
To a new user, Guix's functional architecture can seem quite alien, and possibly offputting. With a combination of extensive #guix-querying, determined manual-reading, and plenty of source-perusing, they may eventually figure out how everything fits together by themselves, but this can be frustrating and often takes a fairly long time.
However, once you peel back the layers, the "Nix way" is actually rather elegant, if perhaps not as simple as the mutable, imperative style implemented by the likes of dpkg and pacman. This series of blog posts will cover basic Guix concepts, taking a "ground-up" approach by dealing with lower-level concepts first, and hopefully make those months of information-gathering unnecessary.