I don't know where Guix stands.
The problem is that I always end up reverting to debian in the end, because it's "professional grade" shit. But then it's ugly and the handy and semi/proprietary stuffs are missing. So you go barebone and you build everything from there because arch is awesome but fuck that shit I want a full skeleton to start on not just a bacteria. Alternative being ubuntu like, it's less ugly and more handy and it's still debian. So you go bare bone because you don't want to go ubuntu, and after a while you get old and you're tired of making the barebone install because of course you never have time to build a fucking script. So you go ubuntu and keep ranting about it. And then you look at new distros. And you remember why you went debian in the end. And the cycle keeps repeating.
I also find myself preferring Debian and avoiding Ubuntu. Lately I have been wondering about OpenSUSE as well.
Debian is reliable, it's not fancy but you know you what you get, to me it's sort of gold standard when it comes to linux
But then, aside from the fact that it's as sexy as a medical unit; you don't have the ppa stuff, which is quite handy when you "try everything until something sticks" tutorials or weird app testing, and of course you have the exotic hardwares issues related to proprietary drivers with the overall no proprietary policy by default... With debian you have to have 100% linux compatible hardware, which isn't the general rule especially when it comes to asus but not only. Ubuntu is more plug and play in that regard
Arch is great, but there are two main issues; 1 it's a "bacteria", for quick easy install gofuckyourself you have to go through the entire "darwininan chain of evolution until you reach a satisfying development level".. Like installing really everything.... They made progress though, you have a couple of fast and easy debian like installers floating around, but still, if there's a driver surprise it's going to be a pain too by default. Also I don't like pacman, I picture that arcade yellow thing in my head every time I type it, it just doesn't feel very serious. You also had yaourt what a shitty handy thing.
And 2) They lack man power I think, they add to drop some 32bit architectures now it's unofficial... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questions#What_architectures_does_Arch_support? And MIPS, no mips architecture support, which is dumb IMO especially for arch which is minimalist by definition
So for those reasons arch isn't my first goto choice, which is too bad because while their doc is fairly hard to digest, it's very complete, and I like their logo and the name too, for once it's not lame as fuck like bubuntu or fefedora
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