If you install guix as a user, it augments or overrides the software available on your base system.

It helps a lot on Chromebooks, where it's not straightforward to get a recent release.

It also helps to get up-to-date packages if you're a regular user and your admin doesn't have them for some reason (maybe RHEL or Ubuntu LTS.)

Or even just if your admin doesn't have the packages installed.

I feel like that brew, or better yet, nix are great options for userspace applications in Linux and macOS