The NixOS 24.11 distribution has been released, based on the Nix package manager and offering a number of its own developments that simplify system configuration and maintenance. For instance, in NixOS, all system configuration is handled through a single configuration file (configuration.nix), allowing for quick rollback to a previous configuration version, supporting switching between different system states, enabling individual users to install specific packages, allowing simultaneous usage of multiple versions of the same program, and ensuring reproducible builds. Installation images with KDE (3.2 GB) and GNOME (2.5 GB) have been prepared for x86_64 and ARM64 architectures, as well as a minimal console version (1.1 GB).
When using Nix, the result of package builds is stored in a separate subdirectory in /nix/store. For example, after building the Firefox package, it may be recorded in /nix/store/1onlv5pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ec5d4-firefox-133.0.0/, where "1onlv5pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ec5d4" is the hash of all its dependencies and build instructions. Package installation refers to either its build or the download of an already built version (provided it has been built on Hydra — the build service of the NixOS project), as well as the creation of a directory with symbolic links to all packages in the system or user profile, with the subsequent addition of this directory to the PATH list. A similar approach is used in the GNU Guix package manager, which is based on Nix's developments. The collection of packages is presented in a special Nixpkgs repository.
Key innovations:
- Added 8141 packages*, removed 3970 packages, updated 20975 packages. Added 119 new modules, removed 30 modules. A total of 2669 developers participated in the development and maintenance of the packages, preparing 49079 changes.
- User environment releases proposed KDE Plasma 6.2 and GNOME 47. Included is the composite server Niri, using Wayland.
- Added 63 new services, including Cyrus IMAP, Collabora Online, Music Assistant, Suricata, Apache Tika, OpenGFW, saunafs, obs-studio, Zapret, Glances, cryptpad, Pingvin Share, wg-access-server.
- In most graphical sessions, the multimedia server is used by default instead of PulseAudio. PipeWire.
- Updated software versions include LLVM 19, PostgreSQL 16, grafana 11.3, knot dns 3.4, qBittorrent 5, NVIDIA driver 560, FFmpeg 7.1, openssl 3.3, Docker 27, Xen 4.19.
- The Nix package manager has been updated to version 2.24, which enhances code extraction from Git repositories and adds support for documenting comments.
- Support for the Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs (hardware.amdgpu.amdvlk) has been added.
- The Moonlight game streaming client now supports HDR on Linux.
- A new service, services.scx, has been added for using task schedulers based on the sched_ext kernel subsystem.
- Support for mounting filesystems from block devices with data integrity checks based on the dm-verity module has been added.
- A new option, virtualisation.xen, has been added for virtualization using the Xen hypervisor.
- The support for the macOS platform in the Nixpkgs repository has been significantly improved. The build environment has been redesigned to support the native Xcode toolchain, simplifying build rules, using the built-in SDKs from various versions of macOS (from macOS 10.12 to macOS 15), and eliminating unnecessary patches during application builds. The Nixpkgs 24.11 release will be the last with support for the macOS 10.x branch, starting from the next version, the minimum required will be the macOS 11 branch.
Source: linux.org.ru
