[4] Differing from traditional package managers, Guix (like Nix) utilizes a purely functional deployment model where software is installed into unique directories generated through cryptographic hashes.

[5][6] This solves the problem of dependency hell,[7] allowing multiple versions of the same software to coexist which makes packages portable and reproducible.

Performing scientific computations in a Guix setup has been proposed as a promising response to the replication crisis.

Dependencies are tracked directly in this language through special values called "derivations" which are evaluated by the Guix daemon lazily.

[14][15] This also enables multiple users to safely install software on the same system without administrator privileges.

Compared to traditional package managers, Guix package stores can grow considerably bigger and therefore require more bandwidth; although compared to container solutions (like Docker) that are also commonly employed to solve dependency hell, Guix is leaner and conforms to practices like don't repeat yourself and single source of truth.

Inherited from the design of Nix, most of the content of the package manager is kept in a directory /gnu/store where only the Guix daemon has write-access.

Guix - like Nix - has built-in garbage collection facilities to help prune dead store items and keep the live ones.

In addition to symlinks, each profile guix builds also contains a union of all the info-manuals, man-pages, icons, fonts, etc.

Guix pack enables the user to bundle together store items and output them as either a docker binary image, a relocatable tarball, a Debian package file, a RPM package file, an AppImage or a squashfs binary.

[51] A system governed via the Shepherd daemon can represent its user space as a directed acyclic graph, with the "system-service," which is responsible for early phases of boot and init, as its root, and all subsequently initialized services as extensions to system-service functionality, either directly or transitively over other services.

[49][52] It is intended to be highly programmable by the system administrator using Guile, but it can also be used to manage per-user profiles of unprivileged daemons and services.

[57] Similar to the roll-back feature of Nix, if a system update leaves users with a broken system, users can easily roll back individual packages as well as the whole system state with a simple command:guix package --roll-back[58] This means that the kind of stable channel that is very common in other Linux distributions is no longer needed for users who are willing to report a bug and wait a few minutes, when trying to update via guix pull.

[61] The documentation has since then been expanded and improved with videos[62] and a cookbook[63] in six languages with tutorials, how-to guides and examples.

One particular area where Guix can offer to the user improvements over traditional package managers is in the field of reproducible scientific workflows, mainly in High Performance Computing.