I’ve been eyeing Guix for a while but haven’t jumped in yet. Honestly, I feel like I’m finally getting comfortable with nixos and flakes over the years. There’s quite a bit of un/relearning to do, and I can’t tell if the flow of Guix’s channels/inferiors would match the ease of composability that I like with flakes. The lock system really does it for me and I don’t like the idea of hunting down refs to pin manually or maintaining my own frankenstein repo (other than my config).

That said, I do use emacs and actually like lisp, so I’m torn right now.

I use keyd for software remapping now, and I like it a lot more than xkb’s esoteric options. It has functionality for layers like layer:C, where any “passthrough” input will have the defined modifier (or combo like C-S-M), but you can define whatever other bindings inside.

Long story short, I’ve used it to remap caps, control, shift (with a custom shift layer for some symbols), and meta, with overloads, double tap/hold into layers, oneshots, timeouts, and all sorts of (surprisingly fluid) nonsense. It’s so much easier than wading through xkb options for me.

To sidestep the question slightly less, I always got rid of capslock altogether instead of swapping. That still leaves true escape to be hit accidentally, but I think there should be an option to change escape too?

Edit: what I always used was

# make CapsLock behave like Ctrl:
setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps

# make short-pressed Ctrl behave like Escape:
xcape -e 'Control_L=Escape'

from here

Generally I agree. It feels kind of shoehorned in when desktop is your goal, like more of an afterthought or side effect of the overall focus.

The main thing I hang on to is the code-specified configuration. I never got into managing dotfiles with arch, but that could be a better solution for many people. Especially along with btrfs, numerous containerization options, and whatnot.

I went from Arch to NixOS, so I can offer a bit there.

You definitely won’t want to rely on it until you know a good amount and get comfortable. Things can be made to work, but knowing how to get it done is the main thing most of the time.

Regarding package availability, it’s just a matter of a few oddly esoteric incantations and version controlled code, usually. Binaries are another story but still possible, and python is a special case of that.

It has been an annoyance for me, but I’ve also learned a lot by getting things to work. If you use any niche python stuff you’re bound to run into something. A bunch is already packaged and works fine, though. Either way there’s a bit of extra nuance, which is more to learn.

You don’t have to start with NixOS and can feel it out using nix on any distro. It can be hard to tell if someone will vibe with it. All that said, it could be more than you’re looking to get into, but you can ease into it if you’re interested.

I’m still on bemenu since I used dmenu with dwm on X. I should probably check the others out.