Recently the release of the new version of the NixOS 22.05 distribution was announced, based on the Nix package manager and providing a series of proprietary developments that simplify the configuration and maintenance of the system.
This Linux distribution It is distributed through two main branches: current stable version and unstable after the 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.
About NixOS
Nix stores all packages in isolation from each other resulting in no / bin, / sbin, / lib or / usr directories and all packages are instead kept in / nix / store. This is a cool look which is not found in other Linux distributions. Each package resides in its own subdirectory / store.
Each package has a unique identifier which captures all its dependencies stored in a cryptographic hash. Although NixOS is a research project, it is a functional and usable operating system that includes hardware detection, KDE as its default desktop, and systemd for managing system services.
NixOS has some tools created by its developers dedicated to DevOps and implementation tasks. With NixOS, the desktop environment automatically starts, which in this case is KDE Plasma 5, which is a fairly clean desktop environment with good aesthetics.
In addition to this, we are given the possibility of being able to pre-choose the packages, the drivers that you want to use, the desktop environment, the display manager, the network administration options, the boot manager, the time zone, the server. display, users, touchpad options, etc.
Main news of NixOS 22.05
In this new version of NixOS 22.05, to simplify the installation of the distribution, a graphical installer based on the Calamares framework is provided, which is used to create installers in projects like Manjaro, Sabayon, Chakra, NetRunner, KaOS, OpenMandriva, and KDE neon. The new installer comes in iso images with GNOME and KDE by default.
More than 89 new services have been added, including aesmd (Intel SGX Architectural Enclave Service Manager), Docker without root (to run Docker without root rights), matrix-conduit (matrix server), apfs (Apple File System), FRRouting (routing protocol implementation), snowflake-proxy (proxy to bypass traffic censorship), pgadmin4 ( GUI to administer PostgreSQL), moosefs (distributed file system), nbd (network block device).
In addition to this, it is highlighted that 9345 packages added, 5874 packages removed, 10666 packages were updated. The package versions that stand out are those of GNOME 42, systemd 250, PHP 8.1, Pulseaudio 15, PostgreSQL 14 and 27 services were removed, mostly with branches of outdated programs or linked to Python2.
Nix package manager updated to version 2.8, which offers support for separately activated experimental functions (flake). For example, an experimental "nix fmt" command has been added to enable output format drivers, and an experimental "impure" mode has been added to generate target content paths that differ on each build. For various options, support is provided for loading content from the input stream (for example, “–file -“).
Also it is noted that the controller security.acme.defaults was added to simplify the configuration to obtain TLS certificates. When using Nix, the output of package creation is stored in a separate subdirectory under /nix/store.
On the other hand, it is also noted that the browser package Firefox x86_64 is built with code profiling optimizations (PGO) to improve performance.
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 size of the full installation image with KDE 1,7 GB, GNOME – 2,2 GB, reduced console version – 820 MB.
To save the NixOS image to a USB stick I can recommend the use of Etcher, which is a multiplatform tool.