When comparing GNU Guix vs Portage, the Slant community recommends Portage for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux package managers?” Portage is ranked 2nd while GNU Guix is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Portage is:
WIth portage you can decide and customize which dependencies to install through some thing called USE flags. These are keywords that when defined, will tell Portage that you want support for the chosen keyword.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Can setup a shell which has exactly the defined libraries available
A method which works across languages and provides a reproducible programming environment.
Pro Can always roll back to a safe state
Guix creates new profile generations for each operation. If anything goes wrong, a simple --roll-back gets you immediately back to the previous, working, generation. Because it is a purely functional package management system, generations don't affect each other, so you're back to the exact same state as before : still working.
Pro Can create independent packages
Guix pack creates packages which do not need Guix to be run.
Pro No side effects when building packages
Guix is a purely functional package management system. This means that the act of building a package does not have side effects, such as destructively updating or deleting files that may be used by other packages.
Pro Can build containers right-away, from docker to tarballs
See guix pack --help and here.
Pro Easy to add your own packages
The clean and declarative syntax makes it easy to define new packages by using an existing one as an example.
Pro Doesn't require root privileges
Normal users can install packages on a Guix-enabled system, or even run their own Guix instance if the system isn't Guix-enabled.
Pro Decide which dependencies to install
WIth portage you can decide and customize which dependencies to install through some thing called USE flags. These are keywords that when defined, will tell Portage that you want support for the chosen keyword.
Pro Sandboxes build process
Portage uses a sandbox as a safety measure during build processes. This is done to ensure that no packages accidentally write outside a 'safe' location.
Pro Can install multiple versions of the same package simultaneously
Slotting is a feature which allows users to install multiple versions of a software simultaneously. This is especially useful for libraries which have changed interfaces between versions.
Pro Allows both binary and source installation
With portage you can either compile packages from source or you can download and install their binary versions.
Pro Simple overlay management
Adding supplemental repositories, aka overlays, is easy with eselect-repository or layman.
Pro Implements a standard with alternate implementations
If you need faster resolution, you can run pkgcore for search and portage for installing, and they work well together.
Pro Respects customized config files
By default, portage doesn't delete or move any customized config files, thus enabling competent users to modify any config file however they want.
Pro You can view a list of programs that can be installed
With portage you can view a list of all the programs that you can install by going to /usr/portage
and running ls
.
Pro Full control over installed packages
You can fully control all packages if you use it properly.
Cons
Con Updates take a long time
It's gotten better over time but both updating Guix itself and updating the installed packages can take a long time.
Con Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions
While the functional approach that Guix takes is great for sandboxing binary artifacts of packages, it seriously lacks any power in handling configuration files or user data. It's difficult to upgrade and downgrade files where semantics and syntax can change between versions.
Con High memory usage
Usually takes between 400-800MB of RSS (no problem to get over 1GB), so it's nothing for an old hardware.
Con Building from source take a lot of processing time
Most of Portage's pros are related to its "porting" process, building packages from source. This is very resource-intensive, with the few biggest packages sometimes taking even multiple hours to update or install.
Con Very slow
Dependency resolution is very slow and single-threaded, so usually you will see one of your cores running like crazy for over a minute.
Con Feature creep
It is very complicated and offers plenty of options.
Con You can not create packages under a non-portage distribution
Makes maintaining software for gentoo based systems a burden.