14 DAY TRIAL // NixOS developer Domen Kožar announced the release of the NixOS 16.03 operating system, which is considered an update to the previous version, NixOS 15.09.
Dubbed Emu, NixOS 16.03 introduces updates to most of the core components, starting with the systemd init system, which has been updated to version 229, and continuing with the Linux kernel packages, now rebased on the latest long-term support branch, version 4.4, replacing the old 3.18 kernels.
Among other pieces of software that received updates during the six-month development cycle of the NixOS 16.03 "Emu" operating system, we can mention GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.3, which is a significant upgrade from the previous 4.9 release, the Glibc 2.23 library, Perl 5.22, as well as Binutils 2.26.
"This is a low profile release, but it contains many small improvements. We had 10567 commits from 448 contributors in this release spanning over 6 months," said Domen Kožar in the release announcement. "The release brings many improvements including Nix 1.12.2, sysyemd 229, Kernel 4.4 and many packages updates."
32-bit ISO and VM images were dropped
NixOS 16.03 "Emu" appears to be a major update, and according to the release notes, there are numerous small under-the-hood improvements that will make a big difference. For example, the Mozilla Firefox and Midori web browsers are now installed by default, the "jobs" NixOS option, wmiimenu, s3sync, Ruby 1.8, and tidy-html5 were removed.
Moreover, the developers no longer provide 32-bit ISO images with a graphical environment, nor VirtualBox appliances for the operating system, with the exception of a minimal 32-bit ISO. Again, there are numerous other small changes, so if you want to know what exactly has been changed, you should check out the official release notes. In the meantime, you can download NixOS 16.03 "Emu" right now via our website.