Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to the project or to the people working on it.
Some links in case anyone’s interested to check it out for themselves:
In case anyone's wondering where my interest is coming from...
Long story short: after trying out NixOS within a VM and being positively surprised by how smooth-sailing it has been (so far), I got pretty much carried away by my (over)confidence to explore even deeper waters. After crawling out of the umpteenth rabbit hole, I concede to have been most intrigued by rde.
Basically, if my understanding is correct, rde is an attempt to bridge the gap between Guix System and NixOS. For example: Guix Home, which is basically Guix’ home-manager, originated from rde.
Furthermore, I find it particularly noteworthy how it’s stateless by default. Which, IIUC, is absolutely not trivially done on Guix System. Simply, because Guix System doesn’t have something akin to the impermanence module found on NixOS.
I’m sure there’s a lot more I could delve into, but I’ll keep it at that for the sake of brevity.
Think of Guix like a pile of mud that you can mold and shape it to have nearly any properties that you want.
Those molding steps that create RDE do create an operating system but at its core, it is just a shaping of that pile of mud.
In such if we define an operating system in those terms, then every Guix user has created their own distro as well.
Alright, that was quite illuminating. I suppose I was definitely not grasping the full extent of the extensibility found on Guix. And, perhaps more importantly, how it’s a defining feature of Guix. Thank you; I appreciate it.