Replying to my own post here. I restarted the VM and both commands reported above worked this time with some warnings but no errors, and seemed like the tasks completed alright.
Unfortunately, there was no directory created under /home for the user I added, although the user existed in the /etc/passwd file. I thought that this would probably be fixed by rebooting the VM again. However, rebooting failed badly with the screenshot below.
Using the grub menu, I rebooted to the first version of the VM, which kind of worked. Several aspects of XFCE was gone, like taskbar, launch menu, etc. Using the right mouse click and context menu, I was able to open up a terminal and run the
sudo guix system reconfigure config.scm command once again. This time it didn’t last nearly as long; however, rebooting got me to the same screen.Perhaps the problem is the qcow2 image, and if I use the iso image instead, I would have better luck. I have to say though that so far I am unimpressed with Guix and I am not sure if I want to spend a few more hours to see if I have better luck with the iso image.
I do appreciate David’s videos and the work put in to this project, and I am probably too dumb to troubleshoot effectively. I guess I was expecting this to be a little more polished.