Hey everyone, we are Ryan Lahfa and Martin Weinelt, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 23.05 “Stoat”.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-12-31).

• Release manual
  • Highlights
  • New Services
  • Backward Incompatibilities
  • Other Notable Changes
  • Nixpkgs internals
  • Detailed migration information
• Upgrade Instructions
• ISO Image Downloads

The 23.05 release was made possible due to the efforts of 1867 contributors, who authored 36566 commits since the previous release.
Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 16240 new packages and 13524 updated packages in Nixpkgs. We also removed 13466 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.
In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 282 new modules and removed 183. In that process we added 2882 options and removed 728.

Removal of weak hashing algorithms

The support for weak password hashing algorithms through the crypt(3) API was disabled in NixOS 23.05. We consider password hashing methods weak if the libxcrypt project did not flag them strong. This change affects user accounts on the local system, as well as the supported algorithms in many applications that rely on that API. Examples are authentication services like OpenLDAP or PAM, databases like PostgreSQL and, more generally speaking, programming languages that offer a password hashing interface like Python. These applications should be migrated away from weak password hashes before upgrading to NixOS 23.05, as the lack of support for these algorithms may make authentication for these applications impossible. If your system has user accounts that rely on such weak hashing algorithms, a warning will be emitted during activation. Existing users accounts are most likely using sha512crypt, for which the hash is prefixed with $6$. These will continue to work for the foreseeable future, but migrating to more modern hashes is strongly recommended anyway. Interactively configured passwords can be updated using passwd, new password hashes can be generated through mkpasswd. Note, that we do offer libxcrypt-legacy as an escape hatch, that affected packages can be overridden with.

Bootspec (RFC-125)

As part of standardization efforts in RFC 125, also called "Bootspec", all new users have a boot.json file in their system top-level derivation, you can check the one on the system you are running in /run/current-system/boot.json for example.
The idea behind Bootspec is to enable new boot usecases in NixOS: UEFI Secure Boot, unifying bootloader installer scripts, multiple initrds or systemd system extensions and A/B schemas.

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank Lennart Mühlenmeier and Winter for editorializing the release notes, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets, staging cycles and build infrastructure, Cole Helbling for his epic effort in bisecting kernel issues with ARM64 for our remote builders, and Graham Christensen for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure.

Reflections and Closing

I am very grateful for being given the opportunity to learn about the release process and run it with the help of everyone in the NixOS community. It has been a very exciting ride and witnessing the efforts of everyone poured in the project made me want to work towards supporting those efforts in many areas of the project, e.g. CI, infrastructure and more. Now that the process documentation has reached, in my experience, a high level of maturity. I believe it is now time for tooling to become consolidated, professional, comfortable and helpful for release managers and editors but also to all the persons close to the release process. As a previous release manager said it, the release process shall become only more boring in the future!

Hey everyone, we are Martin Weinelt and Janne Heß, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-06-30).

• Release manual
  • Highlights
  • Internal changes
  • Notable version Updates
  • Backward Incompatibilities
  • Other Notable Changes
  • New Services
• Upgrade Instructions
• ISO Image Downloads

The 22.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 1652 contributors, who authored 30371 commits since the previous release.
Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable distribution.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 16678 new packages and 14680 updated packages in nixpkgs. We also removed 2812 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.
In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 91 new modules and removed 20. In that process we added 1322 options and removed 487.

Password hashing migration

During the NixOS 22.11 lifecycle old password hashes may need to be updated, because we plan to disable weak password hashes in NixOS 23.05. We consider password hashing methods weak, if the libxcrypt project did not flag them strong. If your system is configured with weak hashes a script will emit a warning during activation. We expect most users accounts to be set up with sha512crypt (hash prefixed with $6$) which we will continue to support. Interactively configured passwords can be updated using passwd, new password hashes can be generated through mkpasswd.

aarch64-linux channel merge

The separate aarch64-linux specific channels have been discontinued. Their jobs have been merged into the generic nixos-22.11 and nixos-22.11-small channels and will thereby receive updates at the same time as their x86_64-linux counterparts.

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank Winter and Jörg Thalheim for editorializing the release notes, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets and staging cycles, and Graham Christensen for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure.

Reflections and Closing

I'm thankful for being given the chance to guide the release process. It is an exciting experience and seeing the tremendous collaborative effort the community invests to make the release a success is inspiring. While previous release managers made great strides to document the process there are lots of steps that could be benefit from better documentation and more tooling. It is our hope that future release managers and the community will iterate further on this.

Hey everyone, I'm Janne Heß, the release manager for 22.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 22.05 “Quokka”.

• Release manual
  • Highlights
  • New Services
  • Backward Incompatibilities
  • Other Notable Changes
• Upgrade Instructions
• Image downloads

The 22.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1611 contributors in 46727 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Sandro Jäckel, Martin Weinelt, Bobby Rong, Mario Rodas, Jonathan Ringer, Jan Tojnar, Jörg Thalheim, sternenseemann, and Robert Schütz.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9345 new packages and 10666 updated packages. Removal of unmaintained packages is also important to keep the package set working and secure. This release removed 5874 packages that were available in 21.11.
nixpkgs also includes a lot of modules that make NixOS what it is. This release brought 89 new modules and removed 27. In that process, the contributors added 1304 options and removed 359.

Nix 2.8

This release brings nix 2.8 as the default nix package. This brings users a lot of fixes, general improvements and increased performance. The main feature that was awaited for a long time is the introduction of experimental features, namely the flakes experimental feature. Users still have to opt into the feature manually (as well as the nix-command feature that was enabled by default in previous nix versions).

Graphical installer

Improving experience for new users is something that the NixOS project has been working on for a long time. After all, NixOS is a very different compared to traditional distributions. To make it easier to get started with a new NixOS system, a graphical installer based on Calamares is now provided. This installer starts by default when launching the GNOME or Plasma ISO and allows for one-time configuration of a new system.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Jörg Thalheim who helped with the changelog as the release editor. Also to Jon Ringer for guiding the release process since NixOS 20.09. Vladimír Čunát and Martin Weinelt for their continued efforts managing and stabilizing staging. More thanks go out to Martin Weinelt for helping me with a lot of questions about the process and some subsystems, your help was greatly appreciated. Also thanks a lot to Graham Christensen for organizing with Equinix Metal to ensure we had enough compute resources and the entire infrastructure team.
Additional thanks go out to Rick van Schijndel for going through all the pain of marking packages that do not build anymore as broken. I hope we can make the process more straightforward in future releases.

Reflections and Closing

This release brought a lot of features and improvements I've been waiting to see in a release channel. It was a great pleasure working with the community and seeing incredible amounts of work being done by the entire community.

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.8.0. It will be available from NixOS - Getting Nix / NixOS.

Here are the release notes:

• New experimental command: nix fmt, which applies a formatter defined by the formatter.<system> flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake.
• Various Nix commands can now read expressions from standard input using --file -.

• New experimental builtin function builtins.fetchClosure that copies a closure from a binary cache at evaluation time and rewrites it to content-addressed form (if it isn’t already). Like builtins.storePath, this allows importing pre-built store paths; the difference is that it doesn’t require the user to configure binary caches and trusted public keys.

  This function is only available if you enable the experimental feature fetch-closure.

• New experimental feature: impure derivations. These are derivations that can produce a different result every time they’re built. Here is an example:

  stdenv.mkDerivation {
    name = "impure";
    __impure = true; # marks this derivation as impure
    buildCommand = "date > $out";
  }
  

  Running nix build twice on this expression will build the derivation twice, producing two different content-addressed store paths. Like fixed-output derivations, impure derivations have access to the network. Only fixed-output derivations and impure derivations can depend on an impure derivation.

• nix store make-content-addressable has been renamed to nix store make-content-addressed.

• The nixosModule flake output attribute has been renamed consistent with the .default renames in Nix 2.7.

  • nixosModule → nixosModules.default

  As before, the old output will continue to work, but nix flake check will issue a warning about it.

• nix run is now stricter in what it accepts: members of the apps flake output are now required to be apps (as defined in the manual), and members of packages or legacyPackages must be derivations (not apps).

The next release is scheduled for 2022-05-30.

Thank you to all the contributors!

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.7.0. It will be available from NixOS - Getting Nix / NixOS.

Here are the release notes:

• Nix will now make some helpful suggestions when you mistype something on the command line. For instance, if you type nix build nixpkgs#thunderbrd, it will suggest thunderbird.

• A number of “default” flake output attributes have been renamed. These are:

  • defaultPackage.<system> → packages.<system>.default
  • defaultApps.<system> → apps.<system>.default
  • defaultTemplate → templates.default
  • defaultBundler.<system> → bundlers.<system>.default
  • overlay → overlays.default
  • devShell.<system> → devShells.<system>.default

  The old flake output attributes still work, but nix flake check will warn about them.

• Breaking API change: nix bundle now supports bundlers of the form bundler.<system>.<name>= derivation: another-derivation;. This supports additional functionality to inspect evaluation information during bundling. A new repository 73 has various bundlers implemented.
• nix store ping now reports the version of the remote Nix daemon.
• nix flake {init,new} now display information about which files have been created.
• Templates can now define a welcomeText attribute, which is printed out by nix flake {init,new} --template <template>.

The next release 149 is scheduled for . The next release is scheduled for 2022-04-18.

Thank you to all the contributors!

The NixOS Marketing Team is pleased to announce the first offical NixOS Community Survey. Please take 5-10 minutes to complete it.

Since the Nix community has been growing faster and larger every month, it's gotten harder to understand who makes up the community and what everyone cares about. So we're conducting this survey to improve our understanding of those questions. We hope to use your responses to develop Nix, NixOS, and Nixpkgs to match your needs and come up with new ideas for growing and serving the community. And we'll publish major findings on Discourse and nixos.org.

All the questions are optional, and all responses are automatically anonymized. We will NOT collect your name, phone number, GitHub handle, IP address, or any other identifying information.

The questions in the survey cover:

• Your background (e.g. What region of the world are you from?)
• The projects you use in the ecosystem (e.g. Are you using NixOS?)
• How you use the projects (e.g. Do you use Nix in production servers?)
• What you like and dislike about the projects (e.g. What do you think is already great about Nix? What do you think contributors should focus on improving?)

This is our first time running a survey like this, so we're also looking for feedback on the survey itself to understand how we can do this better in the future! Thanks!

-Barry @ flox (bpiv400) and the NixOS Marketing Team

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.6.0.

Instructions how to install Nix on different platforms can be found on the download page.

Here are the release notes:

• New builtin function builtins.zipAttrsWith with the same functionality as lib.zipAttrsWith from Nixpkgs, but much more efficient.
• The Nix CLI now searches for a flake.nix up until the root of the current Git repository or a filesystem boundary rather than just in the current directory.
• The TOML parser used by builtins.fromTOML has been replaced by a more compliant one.
• Added :st/:show-trace commands to nix repl, which are used to set or toggle display of error traces.
• New command nix store copy-log to copy build logs from one store to another.
• The commit-lockfile-summary option can be set to a non-empty string to override the commit summary used when commiting an updated lockfile. This may be used in conjunction with the nixConfig attribute in flake.nix to better conform to repository conventions.
• docker run -ti nixos/nix:master will place you in the Docker container with the latest version of Nix from the master branch.

The next release is scheduled for 2022-03-07.

Thank you to all the contributors!

Hey everyone, we're Timothy DeHerrera and Tom Bereknyei, the release managers for 21.11. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.11 “Porcupine”.

• Release manual
  • Highlights
  • New Services
  • Backward Incompatibilities
  • Other Notable Changes
• Upgrade Instructions
• Image downloads

The 21.11 release was possible due to the efforts of 1541 contributors in 41960 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Sandro Jäckel, Fabian Affolter, Martin Weinelt, figsoda, Artturin, Mario Rodas, Bobby Rong, Jörg Thalheim, Robert Schütz, Michael Weiss.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages and we expect this trend to continue.

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before the planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: Fabian Affolter, Sandro Jäckel, figsoda, Sergei Trofimovich, Artturin, Alyssa Ross, Thiago Kenji Okada, Lukas Epple, Tredwell, Bernardo Meurer, and 477 others!

Special Thanks

Thanks to Domen Kožar for revitalizing the Darwin support effort. Jon Ringer for guiding the release process since NixOS 20.09. Vladimír Čunát and Martin Weinelt for their continued efforts managing and stabilizing staging. Thanks to Graham Christensen for organizing with Equinix Metal to ensure we head enough compute resources.

Reflections and Closing

The influx of additional interest in Nix/NixOS is exciting to see. The fairly smooth release cycle is due to the dedication and time of all the volunteers in the community. The continued growth and improvements have been incredible to witness.

Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, the release manager for 21.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.05 “Okapi”.

• Release manual
  • Highlights
  • New Services
  • Backward Incompatibilities
  • Other Notable Changes
• Upgrade Instructions
• Image downloads

The 21.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1745 contributors in 33474 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Frederik Rietdijk, Sandro Jäckel, Tim Steinbach, Jonathan Ringer, Martin Weinelt, Mario Rodas, Robert Schütz, Jan Tojnar, Sterni.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages.

This didn't stop us. In the last six months:

• 12985 packages were added
• 14109 packages were removed
• 16768 packages were updated

Likewise, our NixOS module system got bigger and better:

• 1527 options were added
• 290 options removed
• 400 options were updated

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before the planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: Fabian Affolter, Sterni, Stéphan Kochen, Robert Schütz, Martin Weinelt, Jonathan Ringer, Alyssa Ross, Andrew Childs, Thomas Tuegel, Malte Brandy, and 431 others!

Special Thanks

I would like to give a special thanks to Jan Tojnar and others for the Gnome 40 stabilization effort. Another special thanks should be given to Thomas Tuegel and many others for bringing Plasma 5.21 to NixOS.

Reflections and Closing

I think the RFC80 and RFC85 changes to the release process were successful in limiting risk and making the release more deterministic. This is the first release since 17.03 to have released in the intended month, although the rendered manual and official announcement were delayed a day. In the future, I hope to make the release as "boring" as possible, and have it be a time to improve the quality of nixpkgs' unstable and stable channels.

Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, one of the release managers for 20.09. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 20.09 “Nightingale” ✨.

• Release manual
  • Highlights
  • New Services
  • Backward Incompatibilities
  • Other Notable Changes
• Upgrade Instructions
• Image downloads

The 20.09 release was possible due to the efforts of 1313 contributors in 31282 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Mario Rodas, Frederik Rietdijk, Jörg Thalheim, Maximilian Bosch, Jonathan Ringer, Jan Tojnar, Daniël de Kok, WORLDofPEACE, Florian Klink, José Romildo Malaquias, and 1303 others!

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages.

This didn't stop us. In the last six months:

• 7349 packages were added
• 8181 packages were removed
• 14442 packages were updated

Likewise, our NixOS module system got bigger and better:

• 1119 options were added (61 new modules)
• 476 options removed
• 118 options were updated

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut. While we would like to release on time, a high quality release is more important.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: volth, Robert Scott, Tim Steinbach, WORLDofPEACE, Maximilian Bosch, Thomas Tuegel, Doron Behar, Vladimír Čunát, Jonathan Ringer, Maciej Krüger, and 190 others!

Reflections and Closing

I think that the 20.09 release highlighted a few weak points with our current release schedule. Discussions have already began on how to improve the process from the beginning, to help minimize risk, and set ourselves up for more successes in the future. I want to thank WORLDofPEACE (my co-release-manager) for helping me with release management items, Thomas Tuegel for helping with Qt and Plasma stabilization, as well as Robert Scott for his work with release stabilization.

Hey everyone, I am worldofpeace, one of the release managers for 20.03. As promised, the most glittered stable release is here: NixOS 20.03 “Markhor” ✨.

• Release notes
• Upgrade instructions
• Image downloads

NixOS 20.03 Contributors

We had 1014 people contribute to NixOS 20.03 and 21597 contributions. Thank you soo much, each contribution is valued.

Top 10 ordered by commits

My Reflections and Closing

Being release manager for 20.03 has been a poignant moment for me in being part of NixOS. I had my goals that I set out before I was appointed, but I was really surprised how respected I am in the community. My primary goal was “work collaboratively with all participants in the NixOS project and being supportive of their efforts”. I feel I ✨ shine best in that dynamic in the project, so this really was perfect for me. I hope releasing NixOS has felt better for those involved. With the seeds I’ve planted it should continue to bloom this way.

I’d like to thank Samuel Leathers, my co-release manager, for his congruent effervescence and guidance; Graham Christensen for his organizational encouragement; and obviously every last person I got to work with. Thanks ✌️

In leisure, pause, and experimental grace. worldofpeace.

$ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl

The paper “Atomic Upgrading of Distributed Systems” (by Sander van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra and Merijn de Jonge) has been accepted for presentation at the First ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp). A draft of the paper is available. It describes Sander’s master’s thesis research on DisNix, an extension to Nix that allows deployment and upgrading of distributed systems from a single declarative description. We will continue this research in the Jacquard PDS project, which has now started. (We still have an opening for a PhD student or a postdoc; please contact us if you’re interested.)

The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted for presentation at the 2008 International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s HotOS paper, and argues why the purely functional style and features such as laziness are important for system configuration management. It also provides some measurements on the actual purity of Nix build actions. A draft of the paper is available.

The Nix website was down for a few days due to cooling problems in the server room causing the machine to overheat. These should be resolved now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The Nix website has moved to nixos.org (hosted at TU Delft). The Subversion repositories have moved to svn.nixos.org. See this mailing list posting for information about moving existing SVN working copies.

Eelco Dolstra presented the paper “Maximal Laziness — An Efficient Interpretation Technique for Purely Functional DSLs” at 8th Workshop on Language Description, Tools and Applications (LDTA 2008). It’s about caching of evaluation results in the Nix expression evaluator as a technique to make a simple term-rewriting evaluator efficient. Slides are here.

The Jacquard program of NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4 years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these positions, please have a look at this page, and don’t hesitate to contact Eelco Visser or Eelco Dolstra.

New NixOS installation CD images for i686 and x86_64 are available, which is a good thing as the previous ones were already a few months old. The new images are Nix 0.11-based, contain Memtest86+ as a convenience, should support more SATA drives, and show online help (the NixOS manual) on virtual console 7.

OpenOffice is now in Nixpkgs (screenshot of OpenOffice 2.2.1 running under NixOS, and another screenshot). Despite being a rather gigantic package (it takes two hours to compile on an Intel Core 2 6700), OpenOffice had only two “impurities” (references to paths outside of the Nix store) in its build process that had to be resolved — a reference to /bin/bash and one to /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.

Armijn Hemel, Wouter den Breejen and Eelco Dolstra contributed to the Nix expression for OpenOffice.

Wine now runs on NixOS! Finally we can run all those legacy applications... Thanks to Michael Raskin for adding Wine and a NPTL-enabled Glibc (which Wine seems to need). This is a nice application of purely functional package composition, by the way: Wine didn’t work with the standard Glibc in Nixpkgs, so we just pass it another Glibc at build time.

In other news, Nix 0.11 and Nixpkgs 0.11 will be released soon.

There is now a mailing list (nix-commits@cs.uu.nl) that you can subscribe to if you want to receive automatic commit notifications from the Nix Subversion repository.

Eelco Dolstra presented the paper Purely Functional System Configuration Management at the 11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XI). It gives an overview of the ideas behind NixOS. The slides are also available.

We now have KDE running on NixOS (obligatory screenshot). Just kdebase for now (Martin Bravenboer already added kdelibs a long time ago so that we could run the wonderful KCachegrind), but it contains all the important stuff (Konqueror, KDesktop, Kicker, Konsole, Control Center, etc.).

In related news, we can safely say that, rumours to the contrary notwithstanding, NixOS is not an April Fools’ Joke.

• X server with Compiz window manager.
• Emacs and a few terminals showing off the (near) absence of /lib, /bin etc.; everything is in the Nix store.
• Some applications.

To quote Eelco Visser: new hardware for buildfarm at Delft University of Technology has arrived.

Here’s what we have: 5 Intel Core 2 Duo DualCore machines with 1GB RAM, 2 Mac minis with 1,83-GHz Intel Core Duo-processor, another Core 2 Duo a UPS to deal with spikes in power supply, a console with integrated monitor and keyboard switches, a rack with room for a couple more machines.

Here’s what we’re going to do with the goodies. The five Intel machines and the two MacMinis (also Intel) are going to be used to crank at building hundreds of software packages. Using virtualisation we should be able to run builds on multiple operating system distributions. Read more…