The release of the NixOS 22.11 distribution kit, based on the Nix package manager and providing a number of proprietary developments that simplify system configuration and maintenance, has been released. For example, in NixOS, all system configuration occurs through a single system configuration file (configuration.nix), it provides the ability to quickly roll back the system to the previous version of the configuration, there is support for switching between different system states, installation of individual packages by individual users is supported, it is possible to use several versions at the same time one program, reproducible builds are provided. The size of the full installation image with KDE is 1.7 GB, GNOME is 2.2 GB, and the reduced console version is 827 MB.
When using Nix, the result of building packages is stored in a separate subdirectory under /nix/store. For example, once built, a firefox package might be written to /nix/store/1onlv2pc3ez4n5nskg7ew7twcfd0c5ce5ec5d4-firefox-107.0.1/, where "1onlv2pc3ez4n5nskg7ew7twcfd0c5ce5ec5d4" is a hash of all its dependencies and build instructions. Installing a package means building it or downloading an already built one (provided that it was already built on Hydra, the build service of the NixOS project), as well as creating a directory with symbolic links to all packages in the system or user profile, and then adding this directory to PATH list. A similar approach is taken by the GNU Guix package manager, which is based on Nix. The collection of packages is provided in a special Nixpkgs repository.
Main innovations:
- Added 16678 packages, removed 2812 packages, updated 14680 packages. Updated package versions, including GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.26, Cinnamo 5.4, OpenSSL 3, PHP 8.1, Perl 5.36, Python 3.10.
- The Nix package manager has been updated to version 2.11.
- Added 40 new services, including dragonflydb, expressvpn, languagetool, OpenRGB,
- Systemd-oomd is used to handle out-of-memory situations on the system.
- The algorithm for hashing passwords has been changed to sha512crypt in the libxcrypt implementation. Support for hash algorithms marked as untrusted in libxcrypt will be removed in the 23.05 release.
- Documentation generation has been switched to use markdown markup.
- Support for the aarch64-linux architecture is included in the main nixos-22.11 and nixos-22.11-small build channels. Iso-images for Aarch64 are offered.
- As a replacement for nscd (name service cache daemon), nsncd is proposed, which will be enabled by default in NixOS 23.05.
- Added hardware.nvidia.open option to use NVIDIA's open kernel driver.
Source: opennet.ru