NixOS 21.11 “Porcupine” Released with GNOME 41, KDE Plasma on Wayland

NixOS 21.11

Timothy DeHerrera and Tom Bereknyei proudly announced today the release and general availability of NixOS 21.11 as the latest stable version of this independently developed GNU/Linux distribution.

Dubbed “Porcupine” and coming six months after the NixOS 21.05 release, NixOS 21.11 is here with a lot of goodies, starting with the GNOME 41.1 desktop environment for its dedicated GNOME edition and continuing with Wayland support for the KDE Plasma 5.23 edition, as well as version 6 of elementary OS’ Pantheon desktop.

This release ships with Nix 2.3.16 as default package manager, switches the iptables utility to the nf_tables backend, updates the Hadoop module and package to Hadoop 3 as default with new services like JournalNode, ZKFS and HTTPFS, and improves LXD support to build images directly from configurations.

Another interesting change in NixOS 21.11 is support for running activation scripts during a nixos-rebuild dry-activate and detect the dry activation by reading the $NIXOS_ACTION variable.

“This allows activation scripts to output what they would change if the activation was really run. The users/modules activation script supports this and outputs some of is act,” explain the devs.

Included by default in this release is PHP 8.0, Python 3.9, systemd 249, GNU Bash 5, OpenSSH 8.8p1, kops 1.21.1, PostgreSQL 13, spark 3, kubernetes-helm 3.7.0, and ORY Kratos 0.8.0 Alpha 3. Under the hood, NixOS 21.11 is powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series (Linux 5.10.81 is the default kernel).

Last but not least, NixOS 21.11 comes with numerous new services, including btrbk for backing up btrfs subvolumes, clipcat X11 clipboard manager, PeerTube free and decentralized alternative to video hosting platforms, Hockeypuck OpenPGP key server, and many others that you can find in the release notes.

You can download NixOS 21.11 as GNOME or KDE Plasma live and installable ISO images, as well as a Minimal ISO image right now from the official website. While the GNOME and KDE Plasma ISOs only support 64-bit systems, the Minimal image can also be installed on 32-bit computers.

This release will be supported until the end of June 2022, when NixOS 22.05 will be released as the next major version. Meanwhile, do check out our first look both the GNOME and KDE Plasma editions of NixOS below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos.

Last updated 2 years ago

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