Both guix-daemon.service and guix-publish.service make use of StandardError=syslog and StandardOutput=syslog. When building a guix 1.2.0 or 1.3.0rc* on Debian, I get the following warnings when checking with lintian: W: guix: systemd-service-file-uses-deprecated-syslog-facility lib/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service StandardError=syslog N: W: systemd-service-file-uses-deprecated-syslog-facility N: N: The specified systemd service file specifies StandardOutput= or N: StandardError= that references syslog or syslog-console. N: N: This is discouraged, and systemd versions 246 and above will log a N: warning about this. N: N: Refer to N: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/6706384a89ae0c462e7172588c80667190c4d9e2/NEWS#L724 N: for details. N: N: Severity: warning N: N: Check: systemd Following the above link has this to say: * StandardError= and StandardOutput= in unit files no longer support the "syslog" and "syslog-console" switches. They were long removed from the documentation, but will now result in warnings when used, and be converted to "journal" and "journal+console" automatically. So apparently need to switch the .service files to use "journal". I am not sure what implications that would have for installing guix on a foreign distro, such as minimum systemd version, or if anything needs significant changes. Presumably at some point support for this Standard*=syslog will be dropped entirely from systemd... live well, vagrant