When comparing GNU Guix vs Garuda Linux, the Slant community recommends Garuda Linux for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” Garuda Linux is ranked 26th while GNU Guix is ranked 58th. The most important reason people chose Garuda Linux is:
Uses vram, and a zen kernel.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Super-fast
Uses vram, and a zen kernel.
Pro Themes
The dr460nized KDE theme is awesome.
Pro Easy entrance to Arch Linux
Filled to the brim with lots of quality-of-life changes and optimizations that are simple enough for long-time Windows, long-time Mac users, and Arch newbies to understand. Though, it also leads to bloat or not necessarily helpful extra software. If you're not into the "bloat" added in, try checking out the barebones version, you'll need to know a lot of things bout Arch to fully use barebones.
Pro Highly customized interface
You already have most of the customization done for you out of the box.
Pro Unused RAM is wasted RAM
It takes just a bit more RAM than Manjaro. Edit: This statement is only true if it helps the user and since this could be running on a low end machine this will not.
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 Needs a lot of RAM
Minimum is 4GB, for most Linux distributions it's 2GB or less.