Hey everyone, I’m Janne Heß, the release manager for 22.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 22.05 “Quokka”.
The 22.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1611 contributors in 46727 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Sandro Jäckel, Martin Weinelt, Bobby Rong, Mario Rodas, Jonathan Ringer, Jan Tojnar, Jörg Thalheim, sternenseemann, and Robert Schütz.
NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9345 new packages and 10666 updated packages. Removal of unmaintained packages is also important to keep the package set working and secure. This release removed 5874 packages that were available in 21.11. nixpkgs also includes a lot of modules that make NixOS what it is. This release brought 89 new modules and removed 27. In that process, the contributors added 1304 options and removed 359.
Nix 2.8
This release brings nix 2.8 as the default nix package. This brings users a lot of fixes, general improvements and increased performance. The main feature that was awaited for a long time is the introduction of experimental features, namely the flakes experimental feature. Users still have to opt into the feature manually (as well as the nix-command feature that was enabled by default in previous nix versions).
Graphical installer
Improving experience for new users is something that the NixOS project has been working on for a long time. After all, NixOS is a very different compared to traditional distributions. To make it easier to get started with a new NixOS system, a graphical installer based on Calamares is now provided. This installer starts by default when launching the GNOME or Plasma ISO and allows for one-time configuration of a new system.
Special Thanks
Thanks to Jörg Thalheim who helped with the changelog as the release editor. Also to Jon Ringer for guiding the release process since NixOS 20.09. Vladimír Čunát and Martin Weinelt for their continued efforts managing and stabilizing staging. More thanks go out to Martin Weinelt for helping me with a lot of questions about the process and some subsystems, your help was greatly appreciated. Also thanks a lot to Graham Christensen for organizing with Equinix Metal to ensure we had enough compute resources and the entire infrastructure team. Additional thanks go out to Rick van Schijndel for going through all the pain of marking packages that do not build anymore as broken. I hope we can make the process more straightforward in future releases.
Reflections and Closing
This release brought a lot of features and improvements I’ve been waiting to see in a release channel. It was a great pleasure working with the community and seeing incredible amounts of work being done by the entire community.