You can always use Emacs and treat all low level things as plumbing. Eventually Emacs will hopefully switch to Guile Scheme. In any case Emacs Lisp is a pretty good language and would not feel clumsy to an Scheme hacker, I think.
You can have a pretty modern userland with Org, Gnus or mu4e, pdf-tools, etc.
I have recently switched to GuixSD after 2 years toying with NixOS. All dirty Systemd plumbing fades away and gets replaced with a minimal service manager written in Scheme, GNU Shepherd. Plus all packages are defined in Scheme. It's very refreshing.
I hope one day we get to see a cleaner kernel, ABIs and compilers. Things have gone a bit out of hand.
I'd rather not have Emacs as my environment. I really wish that something like Gnome worked as well as Emacs to be customiseable and extendible, and in fact that everything in /bin would share a cohesive, modular and programmable interface, preferably Scheme, but I'll settle for something sensible.
Emacs, and to a lesser extent, sch, are a nice first step to making a nice environment. But they still feel ten years old, or more. I use TUIs, and appreciate them. But VLC and my window manager should be beholden to the same level of control and interactivity.
And yes, I am never satisfied tweaking my system to my preferences, because I always hit roadblocks before I get there.
(I am totally fine with the kernel, and compilers and the like using "dirty" code -> that's one of the easiest ways to reach a damn fast system.)
> Guile-based Emacs is a branch of GNU Emacs that replaces Emacs’s own EmacsLisp engine with the Elisp compiler of Guile.
One Emacs Lisp engine replaced by another.
> Lastly, it will become possible to write Emacs extensions in Scheme instead of Elisp
That means Emacs Lisp remains the implementation language and the extension language. Guile provides the base machine and Guile Scheme becomes another extension language.
Somewhen in the future..
Personally I think that project is misguided anyway, since it would be much smoother to use some Common Lisp as an implementation language (Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp both are based on Maclisp). But Common Lisp is not popular with RMS.
You can have a pretty modern userland with Org, Gnus or mu4e, pdf-tools, etc.
I have recently switched to GuixSD after 2 years toying with NixOS. All dirty Systemd plumbing fades away and gets replaced with a minimal service manager written in Scheme, GNU Shepherd. Plus all packages are defined in Scheme. It's very refreshing.
I hope one day we get to see a cleaner kernel, ABIs and compilers. Things have gone a bit out of hand.