NixOS, the Linux distribution built around the unique Nix package manager, hits its final release this year.

NixOS adds 16678 new packages and 14680 updated packages to nixpkgs in this release, which also removes 2812 packages to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages, the NixOS 22.11 release brings 91 new modules and removes 20 old ones. In the process, 1322 options were added and 487 were removed.

In addition to many new and upgraded packages, this release includes the following highlights:

highlights

• use crypt Password Hashing API software now uses libxcrypt Provided implementations, rather than glibc’s, make it possible to support safer algorithms.
  • Support for algorithms that libxcrypt considers weak is deprecated starting with this release and will be removed in NixOS 23.05.
  • This includes system login passwords. Given this, all users are strongly encouraged to update their system passwords, as you will not be able to log in without migration when support for password hashing is removed.
    • when using users.users.<name>.hashedPassword To configure user passwords, run mkpasswdand use the provided yescrypt hash as the new value.
    • On the other hand, for interactively configured user passwords, simply use passwd Reset passwords for all users.
    • This release introduces warnings about using deprecated hashing algorithms for both methods of configuring passwords.To make sure your migrations are correct, run nixos-rebuild switch.
• NixOS documentation is now generated by markdown, and while docbooks are still part of the documentation building process, this is a big step towards a full migration.
• aarch64-linux now included in nixos-22.11 and nixos-22.11-small channel. This means that when these channels are updated, x86_64-linux and aarch64-linux will be available.
• aarch64-linux The ISO is now available on the download page.
• nsncd now available as nscd An alternative to using and is planned to be used by default in NixOS 23.05 nsncd.
• hardware.nvidia A new option has been added, namely hardware.nvidia.openwhich can be used to enable the use of NVIDIA open source kernel drivers.

Noteworthy version updates

• Nix has been upgraded from v2.8.1 to v2.11.0
• OpenSSL was updated from 1.1.1 to OpenSSL 3.
• GNOME has been upgraded to version 43
• KDE Plasma has been upgraded from v5.24 to v5.26
• Cinnamon has been updated to 5.4, and now the Cinnamon module uses Blueman as the bluetooth manager by default
• PHP updated from 8.0 to 8.1
• Perl has been updated to 5.36
• Python updated from 3.9 to 3.10

More details can be found at: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes.html