14 DAY TRIAL // The independently developed NixOS 17.03 Linux-based operating system was officially released this past weekend after almost six months of development.
A lot of exciting changes and improvements landed in the NixOS 17.03, which comes as a replacement for the NixOS 16.09 update that some of you out there might be using on your personal computers. First of all, NixOS 17.03 updates the nixpkgs component to be extensible through overlays.
This makes it possible to mark packages in nixpkgs as non-secure through listed vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the development team managed to rewrite the overridePackages function to be replaced by overlays, as well as the cross compilation functionality.
"Cross compilation has been rewritten. See the nixpkgs manual for details," read the release notes for NixOS 17.03. "The most obvious breaking change is that in derivations there is no .nativeDrv nor .crossDrv are now cross by default, not native."
Powered by Linux kernel 4.9 and Nix 1.11.8
Taking a look under the hood of the NixOS 17.03 operating system, we can find the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel, along with Glibc (GNU C Library) 2.25, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.4.0, and systemd 232. The display server was upgraded to the latest X.Org Server 1.19 series, but versions 1.17 and 1.18 are installed for AMD GPUs.
The Nix package manager was updated as well, to version 1.11.8, and the default desktop environment is now KDE Plasma 5 as all the KDE 4 packages have been removed from the installation images. Other than that, NixOS 17.03 defaults to PHP 7.1 and adds support for setting capabilities to the setuid wrapper functionality.
Among other improvements, we can mention that JRE (Java Runtime Environment) now defaults to GTK+ UI, the Python 2.6 packages were completely removed and replaced with those from the Python 2.7 series, pool auto scrubbing support was added to ZFS, and the bind DNS utilities were split into their own output.
Numerous new services were added since last year's NixOS 16.09 release (a full list can be found in the release announcement). Existing users can now upgrade to the NixOS 17.03 release, but they should be aware of the various backward incompatibilities listed by the developers in the release notes. Download NixOS 17.03 right now from our website.
