First and foremost, you must decide if you will authorize your copy of Guix to trust the default build/substitutes/derivations service provider (that is, the Guix project itself), the installation guide you followed explains how to trust the default substitutes service provider (at step 7), it's important that you follow that section if you don't want your own computer to try to build the universe.
Also, there are other package recipe and substitutes service providers around the world of course, but these you have to find and add by yourself. As you have seen, Guix is package manager which allows the user to add custom packages, custom repositories, and custom substitutes. And, of course, after doing step 7, do the following as root: # guix pull Then you can proceed to do as the guide tells, for example: This finishes the root-user-level installation. However, as you said: `guix package -i hello` doesn't do what you expect, this means *both* of the two things: 1. You're trying to run guix as normal user. 2. The `guix` command wasn't made available by the root user to the other users, so you must have skipped step 6.
