NixOS is a Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager. It uses declarative configuration and allows you to reliably update the system.
It was made known andhe release of the new version of NixOS 23.11 with code name “Tapir” in which 2162 contributors participated, authors of 40024 commits since the previous version. Added 9147 new packages and 18700 updated packages in Nixpkgs. 4015 packages were also removed in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure, in addition to 18 modules being removed and 113 new ones added.
This Linux distribution It is distributed through two main branches- stable, current and unstable version after latest development.
Although NixOS started as a research project, now it is a functional and usable operating system which includes hardware detection, KDE as the default desktop systems, and service management system.
Main new features of NixOS 23.11 “Tapir”
In this new version that is presented of NixOS 23.11 and in this new release sThe Gnome desktop environment has been updated to version 45 and notably, Loupe replaced Eye of GNOME as the default image viewer, Snapshot replaced Cheese as the default camera app, and Photos will no longer be installed.
Another change that stands out in this new version is the update of LLVM to version 16 (previously LLVM 11 was offered) in which added support for new architectures and CPUs and significant performance improvements, llvm-objdump is now a better replacement for GNU objdump, multiversioned, among other things.
In addition to that, systemd has been updated to version 254 and with this update now boot.resumeDevice must be specified when hibernating if not in EFI mode, as well as systemd can warn the system about the permissions of your ESP partition (often /boot), this warning can be ignored for now.
It is also mentioned that the mdraid support is now optional, which reduces the size of initramfs and prevents potentially unwanted automatic RAID detections and activations.
Emacs macport version 29 was introduced, which includes major additions such as tree-sitter support (enabled by default) and the pgtk variant (useful for Wayland users), which is available in the emacs29-pgtk attribute.
The go-ethereum package has been updated to version 1.12.0, which reduces proof of work support. His GraphQL API now encodes all numeric values as hexadecimal strings and the GraphQL UI is updated to version 2.0. The Default database changed from leveldb to pebble but using leveldb can be forced.
The Caddy got a new option called services.caddy.enableReload which is enabled by default. Allows you to reload the service instead of restarting it, if only one configuration file has changed. This option should be disabled if you have disabled the Caddy API Manager.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- google-chrome-beta/chromiumBeta google-chrome-dev/chromiumDev have been removed due to lack of maintenance in nixpkgs
- etcd has been updated to version 3.5
- The major PostgreSQL version is now 15.
- Added experimental sudo-rs support with the security.sudo-rs experimental module
- Support for WiFi6 (IEEE 802.11ax) and WPA3-SAE-PK was enabled in hostapd, along with a major overhaul of the hostapd module.
- LXD supports virtual machine instances now to complement existing container support.
- The iptables firewall module installs nixos-firewall-tool now, which allows the user to temporarily open ports
- Added a new option to the virtualization module that allows you to specify explicitly named network interfaces on QEMU virtual machines.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.
Download NixOS
Si want to test this Linux distribution on their computersThey must download the system image from the official website of the project where they can find a link in the download section. The link is this.
The full installation image size with KDE 2.5 GB, GNOME 2.4 GB and the reduced console version 990 MB.
To save the NixOS image to a USB stick I can recommend the use of Etcher, which is a multiplatform tool.