NixOS 23.11 “Tapir” Released with the GNOME 45 Desktop and Wi-Fi 6 Support

This release also adds support for the sudo-rs package as a reimplementation of the sudo package written in Rust.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
NixOS 23.11

NixOS, a Linux distribution and a set of packages usable on other Linux systems and macOS, has been updated today to version 23.11, a release that comes with new and updated components, as well as various new features.

Coming six months after NixOS 23.05, the NixOS 23.11 release is here to introduce the latest GNOME 45 “Riga” desktop environment series. The GNOME edition ships with the GNOME 45.1 desktop by default on a Wayland session for both bare metal and virtual machines.

Due to the upstream changes, the GNOME edition of NixOS comes with a slightly different software selection compared to the previous release. It now includes Loupe as the default image viewer, Snapshot as the default camera app, and the GNOME Photos app has been removed from the installation image.

On the other hand, the KDE Plasma edition ships with the latest KDE Plasma 5.27.9 LTS desktop environment, which is accompanied by the latest KDE Frameworks 5.112 and KDE Gear 23.08.3 software suites. Just like the GNOME edition, the KDE Plasma edition also defaults to the Wayland session.

NixOS 23.11 with the KDE Plasma desktop

NixOS 23.11 also introduces support for Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) wireless networks, along with the enablement of the WPA3-SAE-PK security protocol in the hostapd package and a revamped hostapd module.

Under the hood, there are a lot of updated components, including LLVM 16, PostgreSQL 15, FoundationDB 7, systemd 254, ROCm 5.7.0, Cassandra 4, yarn-berry 4.0.1, and GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.38. NixOS 23.11 remains powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series and includes Linux 6.1.64 by default.

Another interesting change in this release is the implementation of the sudo-rs package as a reimplementation of the sudo package written in Rust. This comes with an experimental new module security.sudo-rs and can be enabled with security.sudo-rs.enable = true;.

“The sudo-rs module only takes configuration through security.sudo-rs, and in particular does not automatically use previously-set rules; this could be achieved with security.sudo-rs.extraRules = security.sudo.extraRules; for instance,” explain the devs.

For more details, check out the release notes. NixOS 23.11 is available for download right now from the official website as Graphical and Minimal ISOs. The Graphical ISO flavors come pre-installed with the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments.

Last updated 5 months ago

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