Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

Thank you for the helpful comments. I have revised the diagram
accordingly. Please let me know if I missed something.

>>> * "Guix system services": consider renaming "Guix" to "GuixSD".
>>
>> One issue with "GuixSD" is that GuixSD does not exist independently of
>> Guix, e.g., you can not install Guix without getting GuixSD tools and
>> packages. FWIW, thinking that these were separate caused a lot of
>> confusion for me in the first few weeks of using GuixSD.
>>
>> From a Guix-centric point of view, whether your system is running "Guix
>> system services" or "Debian system services" only depends on whether you
>> have gotten around to running 'guix system init'. This is actually an
>> incredibly powerful and, so far, "not much talked about" feature of
>> Guix. But untill we know how we want to present this feature to the
>> world, I think we should go easy on pushing the idea that Guix and
>> GuixSD are so separate.
>
> Since I haven't run Guix on a foreign distro yet, I might not understand
> this point as well as you do. Are you saying that you can run "Guix
> system services" on Debian at startup if you run "guix system init"?

I am saying you can "upgrade" your computer from, say, Guix on Debian to
GuixSD by doing ...

     mount /dev/sdX /mnt
     guix system init /mnt/etc/config.scm /mnt

... where /dev/sdX is a new system disk. With more complicated maneuvers
you can no doubt convert an existing system disk.

- George