The NixOS 19.03 distribution was released, based on the Nix package manager and providing a number of its own developments that simplify system setup and maintenance. For example, NixOS uses a single system configuration file (configuration.nix), provides the ability to quickly roll back updates, supports switching between different system states, supports the installation of individual packages by individual users (the package is placed in the home directory), and allows simultaneous installation of several versions of the same program . The size of the full installation image with KDE is 1 GB, the shortened console version is 400 MB.
Main innovations:
- The Pantheon desktop environment, developed by the Elementary OS project, is included (enabled via services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon.enable);
- The module with the Kubernetes container orchestration system, which is divided into separate components, has been significantly redesigned. To increase security, TLS and RBAC are enabled by default;
- Added options to systemd.services to run services in a chroot environment;
- Added installation image for Aarch64 architecture with support
UEFI; - Updated versions of distribution components, including CPython 3.7 (was 3.6);
- Added 22 new services, including CockroachDB, bolt, lirc,
roundcube, weechat and knot.
When using Nix, packages are installed in a separate /nix/store directory tree or a subdirectory in the user's directory. For example, a package is installed as /nix/store/f3a4h95649f394358bh52d4vf7a1f3-firefox-66.0.3/ where "f3a4h9..." is the unique package ID used to control dependencies. Packages are designed as containers containing the components necessary for the application to work.
It is possible to determine dependencies between packages by scanning the hash identifiers in the directory of installed packages to find the presence of already installed dependencies. It is possible both to download ready-made binary packages from the repository (when installing updates to binary packages, only delta changes are downloaded), or build from source with all dependencies. The collection of packages is provided in a special Nixpkgs repository.
Source: opennet.ru