Hey everyone, we are figsoda and Ryan Lahfa, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 23.11 “Tapir”.
This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2024-06-30).
The 23.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2162 contributors, who authored 40024 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release.
NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9147 new packages and 18700 updated packages in Nixpkgs. We also removed 4015 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 113 new modules and removed 18. In that process we added 1565 options and removed 362.
GNOME 45
GNOME has been updated to version 45 “Rīga”, which introduces a new image viewer, a new camera app, and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.
Default LLVM Version
The default version for the LLVM package set has been updated to 16 (from 11) on both Linux and Darwin, which introduced lots of new features and improvements. The full lists of changes are available here (LLVM) and here (Clang).
Special Thanks
We want to personally thank Alejandro Sánchez Medina and Lennart Mühlenmeier for editorializing the release notes, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets, staging cycles and build infrastructure, Cole Helbling for his epic effort in bisecting kernel issues with ARM64 for our remote builders, and Graham Christensen for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure.
Reflections and Closing
I am very thankful for this opportunity to learn about and participate in the release process. It has been an awesome experience to work with everyone on this release, and I want to say thank you to everyone in this community that built NixOS and helped made this release better.