thats it :) Now you need to pin package versions to guix versions via inferior so that you can share the manifest and be sure you have exact same stuff on the other machine. Otherwise the specified packages get updated everytime you update your system. I learned that the hard way by having to wait for latex to download everytime I updated my system.
yes, you would share with him guix manifest which is a file that specifies which packages should be present. What is important to note are inferiors which is a mechanism to version lock the packages.
I love it especially because of the guix shell and guix shell container for dev environment isolation. It is a whole different ecosystem from the ground up though so it’s not an easy ride. But those two features make it worth it for me. Also it’s GNU distro which imo is a plus.
I used Ubuntu 24.10. on new Ubuntu certified Intel Thinkpad and exeperienced system hangs every few weeks. The only solution was to reboot. Frustrating to say the least. On that system also webcam didn’t work so maybe it was kernel fault somehow but still very disappointing given the “certified” status.
From enduser perspective the most visible change would be that all software wouldn’t be hostile to users because with propreitary you have to be very picky to get that.
In the long term we would see that companies could not build walled gardens to block off competition. Contrast Windows & MacOS vs Linux with its different distros, DEs, toolkits etc.
The least difference would be for enterprise because support is expensive either way.