+1, Guix is quite good with some tricks up it's sleeve compared to Nix.

I am not a fan of S-expressions but using scheme is more reasonable than nix+bash to me.

On the negative side, guix can be slow. It is also not a very pragmatic os. NixOS does non-free firmware and drivers without issue. You need to jump through some hoops for this with Guix. This is not an issue if you plan to run guix in a VM though.

Does guix have a flake equivalent yet?

I mean it's pretty wild to take s-expressions and not call them extremely terrible to read. The nix language sucks really badly, but I gladly take it over writing S-expressions.