I have the default Guix config, and it’s a huge bloat. It takes too long to install and update (at least four to six hours!). There’s lots of unnecessary packages that I see, like MariaDB or PostgreSQL. I don’t want any of these extra packages, I just need the GNOME desktop, a few coreutils libraries and Kakoune as my text editor.
The fact that you see guix downloading mariadb is probably due to “inputs bloat” you may never be able to get rid of it without an upstream fix or providing your own implementation of some upstream package/service. 4 to 6 hours is a lot, do you use substitutes?
If you want to reduce the bloatedness of your operating-system record, look into
%desktop-servicesor%base-services(depending on which one you are overriding) and delete/replace what you will withmodify-services.Here are my configurations.