I know, not an amazing alternative imo as they're also saying it takes a long time. I just wish I didn't need to be all in into Guix to easily play around with such projects, which aside from that, look really cool.
Otherwise, you don't have to change OS to run guix the package manager, it can be installed on a "foreign distro", i.e., on top of Debian, or something else. Details here https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Installation.html
You would then use your "guix" command at the terminal to download any of the 29,253 packages here https://packages.guix.gnu.org/ (or just artanis).