NixOS 23.05 Released with GNOME 44, KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, and Linux 6.1 LTS

This release also brings support for the latest Budgie and Cinnamon desktop environments.
NixOS 23.05

NixOS, a Linux distribution and a set of packages usable on other Linux systems and macOS, has been updated today to version 23.05, a release that comes with new components and various new features.

Dubbed “Stoat”, NixOS 23.05 is here exactly six months after NixOS 22.11 and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series. The previous release was using the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, so you should see improved hardware support the next time you install NixOS or even for existing installations.

Also new in NixOS 23.05 is support for the latest GNOME 44 and KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment series, which are used by default for the flagship editions of NixOS in live environments so you can try them before you install them. In addition, the Cinnamon 5.6 desktop environment is now available for installation.

This release also uses systemd 253.1 as the default init system. The developers recommend users using nixos-rebuild boot and reboot instead of nixos-rebuild switch due to the fact that there are some rare cases where the switch of a live system might fail.

Several new services have been added in NixOS 23.05 as well to provide users with various new functionality. Notable here is the hyprland dynamic tiling Wayland compositor, the gmediarender headless UPnP/DLNA renderer, and the Budgie desktop environment.

Other than that, there’s a new --specialisation option added to the nixos-rebuild tool to let you change specialization for switch and test commands, the Python implementation was updated with PEP 668 to provide users with better feedback when running pip install system-wide, the boot.bootspec.enable internal option is now enabled by default, and the libxcrypt the password hashing library was built without support for algorithms that aren’t flagged as strong.

Last but not least, for those wishing to install NixOS with elementary OS’ Pantheon desktop environment, the devs note the fact that it now defaults to Mutter 43 and gnome-settings-daemon 43, and that all the Pantheon-related packages are now tracking the latest elementary OS 7 updates. For more details, check out the full release notes.

NixOS 23.05 is available for download right now from the official website as GNOME, KDE Plasma, and Minimal editions for 64-bit, AArch64 (ARM64), and 32-bit architectures. This release will receive support until the end of December 2023.

Last updated 10 months ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com