I'm going to try out Guix System (formerly GuixSD) as a server operating system. I love the concept of an immutable OS like Nix / Guix, but when I tried NixOS several years ago I hated how unpolished everything was: Especially nix-flakes, which seem to be simultaneously "recommended! you won't want to go back to channels!" and also "unstable and unsupported: Use at your own risk!", with no indications that anyone in the ecosystem saw this as a problem, or at least expected it to be fixed soon. And, indeed, nix-flakes remains in the same state ~4 years later. I also hated the nix language, which seems to have almost all of the downsides of lua and haskell combined, without any of the nice things about either of those languages.
I'm hopeful that Guix is saner / at least less weirdly fine with everything being in perpetual limbo. I already know I like Guile, so that's a start.
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I've now spent a decent amount of time with guix, and on balance I think it's coming out ahead. There are some major downsides, mostly to do with cases where ideological purity of the guix developers has won out over reasonableness. But so far, I think the negative effects of this are substantially less bad than the negative effects of the indecisiveness and (imo) bad design choices of the NixOS community.
I'm still only about 50% of the way through my evaluation period, but I'd say it's looking good for guix.
1. Indeed, guile as a configuration language is so much better than nix-the-language. I honestly don't even know why someone would create nix-the-language instead of using almost anything else.
2. While there are ideological annoyances (e.g. linux-libre, the default kernel, is very dumb about microcode updates, imo, in service of purity), there are pretty great and easy escape hatches (nonguix) that let you get the benefits of a saner world while letting the devs keep their purity.
3. So far the only genuinely annoying thing is that the guix devs had some kind of conflict with the guy who tried to get ZFS merged a couple of years ago, which resulted in there not being a simple way to get ZFS working. I'm partway through setting it up "the hard way" now, using a guide by that same guy; if this goes poorly it may be the thing that kills guix for me.
4. The package selection is much, much weaker than on nixos
5. I had to wrestle with terminfo to get a sane setup, as one often does on distributions where people haven't thought carefully about terminfo. I think this was also a problem on Nixos though.
6. But oh man do I love having a decent fucking manual.
If the ZFS install goes well, I may just go ahead and resolve this to "YES". If it doesn't... then maybe I'll give btrfs a try or something, though it would be a real shame.