[kyoji]

I play around with a Guix install in a VM, and with less than half of my system resources, a `guix pull` with a `guix system reconfigure ...` takes about 10 minutes. That said, if a pull happens to include a kernel update it can take much longer. I think pinning large packages (like the kernel) that may not need incidental updating is key to keeping pull times lower.

[tadfisher]

10 minutes is still an order of magnitude slower than a nixos-rebuild if you're hitting the cache, and there's no issue with forgetting to rebuild the guix profile. If you include nonguix (as is required for the 99% of users who need nonfree blobs) you get the 30-50 minutes as described in the article. I believe Nix-the-language being lazily evaluated is a big part of this; you can even inadvertently evaluate nixpkgs multiple times and not notice.

[opan]

>(as is required for the 99% of users who need nonfree blobs)

If you forgo the built-in WiFi, the ThinkPad T440p (Haswell) works fine without any blobs (speaking from experience). I think all newer gens need iGPU blobs, sadly, but I wanted to point out a viable middle ground between modern Nvidia gamerware setups and Librebooted X200s that can barely browse the web.