I think it’s worth the effort since it prevents numerous risks at the root, for sure it’s not enough. I agree that bootstrapping wouldn’t necessarily solve the XZ attack, but I think that should be solved by big tech paying FOSS maintainers enough or at all to prevent them from burning out.

About the BSD experience that looks like a big amount of work but definitely worth it, I’m sure they didn’t ship many packages as Guix ships but I guess the projects have different goals and requirements.

My point on binaries was not really about reproducibility as nowadays most distros have reproducible builds: Arch, Debian, RHEL, SUSE and probably more. My point is that packages in Guix are bootstrapped from a very small binary seed, something like 357 bytes, which highly mitigates the risk of Trusting Trust attacks

I find Guix far better on almost every remark, in no particular order:

• as you said some part of the Nix community is made of techbros (even if Guix attracts some fossbros as well)
• the way governance is structured in the Nix community is brittle, just see the drama from which all the new Nix forks spawned
• better documentation. The doc for Nix is scattered, the Guix manual, albeit not perfect, is much more complete
• the Guile language is far clearer than Nix, also you don’t have to use it only for package recipes, you can build full applications with it
• the Guix story around trustability of binaries is far better (checkout how Guix boostrapps everything), entires classes of vulnerabilities are prevented by design
• the Guix UX is far better designed imho, the command line is intuitive and well documented and features are easily composable
• the community is not diverging, as is the case for Nix flakes
• Guix as well provides OCI integration, check out the point about enabling gocix

Totally Guix, it has no systemd and is able to roll back to the last working in case you break anything somehow

Defintely this, it’s also the best option to run Fediverse instances such as Bonfire https://fishinthecalculator.me/blog/bonfire--guix-a-love-story.html