The release of the NixOS 25.05 distribution has been announced, based on the Nix package manager and providing its own developments to simplify system setup and maintenance. In NixOS, all system configuration is done through a single configuration file, configuration.nix. It offers the ability to quickly roll back the system to a previous configuration version and switch between different system states. Individual users can install separate packages and utilize multiple versions of the same program simultaneously. Reproducible builds are ensured. For x86_64 and ARM64 architectures, an installation image with a graphical environment (3.7 GB) and a streamlined console version (1.4 GB) have been prepared.
When using Nix, the result of package builds is stored in a separate subdirectory in /nix/store. For example, after building, the firefox package may be written to /nix/store/5onlv1pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ec5d4-firefox-138.0.4/, where "5onlv1pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ec5d4" is the hash of all its dependencies and build instructions. Installing a package means either building it or downloading it pre-built (provided it has been previously built on Hydra — the NixOS project's build service), along with creating a directory with symbolic links to all the packages in the system or user profile, and subsequently adding this directory to the PATH list. A similar approach is applied in the GNU Guix package manager, which is based on Nix's work. The collection of packages is presented in a special Nixpkgs repository.
Key innovations:
- 7840 packages have been added, 1694 packages have been removed, and 28054 packages have been updated. 137 new modules and 1930 configuration options have been added, while 10 modules and 215 options have been removed. 2857 developers participated in the development and maintenance of the packages, preparing 57054 changes.
- The release of the GNOME 48 desktop environment has been proposed. The Decibels music player is enabled by default. The default installation of the GNOME Shell extensions package (gnome-shell-extensions) has been discontinued.
- The Cinnamon 6.4, Pantheon 8 (elementary OS), and Xfce 4.20 user environments have been updated.
- Support for the COSMIC user environment has been added.
- New modules have been added: Anubis, AmneziaVPN, Cursor, Kismet, vwifi, Ghidra, Yggdrasil-Jumper, MaryTTS, doh-server, Schroot, Firezone, PostgREST, postgres-websockets, pgBackRest, µStreamer, nfc-nci, victorialogs, Zipline, vsmartcard-vpcd, LiteLLM, Rebuilderd, GNU Rush, GoDNS, etc.
- Updated software versions, for example, Linux kernel 6.12 (formerly 6.6), GCC 14, LLVM 19, OpenSSH 10.0p2 (support for DSA keys discontinued).
- Support for creating containers (virtualisation.containers) based on Podman, operating in rootless mode has been added.
- The command 'nixos-rebuild build-image' has been implemented for building specific disk images based on the specified configuration.
- The nixos-option command has been rewritten and updated to use Nix expressions.
- The method of forming packages with Mesa drivers has been redesigned. Installed system applications associated with different versions of Mesa should now work correctly, and the global version of Mesa can be managed without massive rebuilding.
- Support for the Lockable HTTP Tarball protocol has been added to the channels.nixos.org repository, allowing the use of nixexprs.tar archives as Nix Flake images.
- The '—flake' option has been added to the nixos-generate-config command for generating a flake.nix file in addition to the configuration.nix and hardware-configuration.nix files, simplifying integration with flake-based configurations.
Source: opennet.ru
