NixOS 24.05 Updates to KDE Plasma 6, GNOME 46, and Linux 6.6, and Introduces Lomiri

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 NixOS 24.05 Updates to KDE Plasma 6, GNOME 46, and Linux 6.6, and Introduces Lomiri


NixOS 24.05 "Uakari" has been released as the new version of the distribution built with the Nix package manager, aimed at creating "reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems." It is an immutable operating system that uses atomic updates and supports rollbacks, but conceptually differs from the approaches of Fedora, openSUSE, and Vanilla OS.

While previous releases introduced significant new features, NixOS 24.05 stands out for its software updates. The maintainers mention that this release results from the work of 2,491 contributors who made 47,795 commits since the previous version of the distribution. A total of 17,777 new packages have been added, 16,429 have been updated, and 9,393 were removed. As a result of these package changes, 145 modules have been added, 23 removed, and 1,983 processes were incorporated compared to 304 that were eliminated.

As mentioned earlier, the most notable aspect of this release is the software update, particularly the inclusion of GNOME 46 and KDE Plasma 6. These updates are already familiar, as Ubuntu and Fedora have adopted GNOME 46 in their latest versions, and KDE Plasma 6 is now offered by several major distributions, including Fedora, Arch Linux, KDE neon, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Other desktop environments mentioned include Cinnamon 6 with its experimental Wayland session, LXQt 2.0, MATE 1.28, and Lomiri, the graphical interface formerly known as Unity 8, which stands out for using Mir 2 as the Wayland compositor.

The Linux kernel has been updated from version 6.1 to 6.6. Beyond the numerous details that each new Linux release entails, the most noteworthy aspect is the improved hardware support. Speaking of hardware support, firmware blobs are now compressed with zstd, resulting in a 4.4% increase in size but offering improved decompression speed in return.

Continuing with more features of NixOS 24.05, the system now installs a loader that is an ELF (Executable and Linkable Format) stub that prints an informative error message when users try to run binary files that are not made for NixOS. This loader can be disabled with the environment.stub-ld.enable option.

All details about NixOS 24.05 are available in the official announcement and release notes, and the system can be obtained in various formats from the download section of the project's official website (ISO images with GNOME and KDE Plasma are in the "NixOS > ISO Image" section).







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