How 'recent' are the packages?
I care for little things, but say.. libvirt or Firefox would be something I'd like to keep quite up to date. Is it possible to run Firefox (not Iceweasel)?
Do you use any 'unfree' packages and how much hassle is it to acquire those?
It's the only place I know of where you can currently get GCC 7.1. [0]
> Is it possible to run Firefox (not Iceweasel)?
If you spun up your own package, and didn't distribute, probably. The IceCat package is 746 lines of Scheme at the moment, so porting it might not be complete hell. [1]
That being said, the current IceCat is based on Firefox 52, so that's a fairly close version-parity, even if you miss out on the nonfree aspects of FF.
> libvirt
Guix currently has libvirt 3.2.0, whereas the very latest is 3.3.0. A fairly close parity, and I'd expect an update to the Guix package soon-ish.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/g.html
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages...
This is the main think holding me back from switching to GuixSD (from NixOS). While I do like the prospect of running a 100% free OS, I'm not 100% sure I can with my current hardware. If I install GuixSD, and find out that I need a non-free driver or kernel, the responsibility of getting that falls on my completely inexperienced lap. I would be much more inclined to run a partially non-free system to get used to GuixSD, then start cutting out the non-free parts.
The only "unfree" package I use is the vanilla Linux kernel (for non-free wifi firmware), which is fairly easy to tie into the system configuration.