When comparing RPM (RPM Package Manager) vs GNU Guix, the Slant community recommends RPM (RPM Package Manager) for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux package managers?” RPM (RPM Package Manager) is ranked 5th while GNU Guix is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose RPM (RPM Package Manager) is:
This makes maintenance and support easy.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to create packages on non-rpm based distros
This makes maintenance and support easy.
Pro Follows the UNIX philosophy
It only does one thing and that well.
Pro Part of LSB
It is part of the Linux standard base.
Pro Very easy to create packages
It is very easy to create packages for it, you just need a small spec file.
Pro Standard archives
RPM packages are simple cpio archives that have additional compression support.
Pro Much more advanced than apt
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.
Cons
Con No interaction
RPM does not support user interaction upon install.
Con Many forks
Currently there exist rpmv4, rpmv5 and distribution specific forks like Mandrake's urpm.
Con Plenty of different frontends
Almost any rpm distro has its own frontend for rpm there is zypper, yum, apt-rpm, dnf, poldek and many more.
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.