I see more and more talk of GNU Guix. It's nice to hear its ecosystem flourishing.
Do you find yourself running into more or less annoyances than a usual distro?
I use GNU Guix as a package manager on Ubuntu. I don't use "Guix System" (the standalone OS). Guix is good for getting Common Lisp libraries, with all the dependencies sorted out for you. I use Guix because I don't use Quicklisp. There are more than 500 Common Lisp libraries in Guix at the moment, and it is easy to package additional libraries, since all the foundational ones have already been packaged (e.g. alexandria, usocket, cffi, hunchentoot, etc.).
I also use Guix for:
* Getting newer versions of software that are not yet available in Ubuntu.
* Installing programs from source. With Guix, I can know exactly what a C program depends on, instead of guessing which versions of headers and libraries it really uses.