For me it’s PeppermintOS.
I started my Linux adventure a few years ago, and haven’t owned a Windows PC since.
I currently use Arch on my main rig, and I wanted to install Linux on two old laptops that I found laying around in my house
I then remembered the first distro I ever used, which is PeppermintOS, and I was amazed at the latest updates they released.
They even have a mini ISO now to do a net-install with no bloat, with a Debian or Devuan base.
Sadly, I believe the founder passed away a few years ago, which is why I was really happy to see the continuation of this amazing project.
I love the idea of guix, the syntax and docs seem much nicer, but the most important feature of NixOS for me is reproducability. If i’m installing all my software in distrobox, it is no longer reproducoble. Guix also seems to lack an alternative to Flakes.
Reproducibility is a big topic for Guix developers and users as well, just have a look at how many times they talk about that: https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2022/07/is-reproducibility-practical/
Also correct me if I’m wrong but I think Guix goes further on reproducibility than Nix, because everything they package is from source, whereas my understanding is that a lot of Nix packages are built from binaries.
Guix does have great reproducability. The person I was replying to was recommending people use distrobox for software that isn’t packaged, I was saying that isn’t reproducible.
The very large majority of nixpkgs is built from source, but there are a few apps that can’t be built for whatever reason. This is still reproducible because it fetches a tagged version of the software and checks it against a hash.
Yes, that’s true. You lose reproducibility by using distrobox. But so far I did not need distrobox on my Guix laptop, the nonguix repo was enough. It was just a suggestion for somebody caring more about availability of packages than reproducibility to use Guix as the stable base and distrobox on top.