NixOS 24.05 Release

It’s release week for NixOS! The brand new 24.05 release, codename “Uakari”, is out officially out. The release managers deserve thanks for their work in making this release happen. Thank you to Weijia Wang, Jörg Thalheim, and everyone else who contributed to this event no matter how small. A full release announcement can be found on the NixOS blog and comprehensive release notes are available in the manual. While this article will not cover all of the highlights and breaking changes found in the release, the following are a set of interesting changes picked out by the author of nixpkgs.news.

24.05 highlights

  • The default Linux kernel is now version 6.6.
  • Linux firmware blobs are now compressed with zstd which results in an increase file size, but faster decompression speed.
  • A new ELF loader is now available to improve the non-nix packaged software user experience.
  • NIX_PATH and the Flake Registry will now automatically have the system’s nixpkgs input pinned when creating systems with nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem.
  • Plasma 6 is now available.
  • Lomiri (formerly Unity8) is now available.
  • MATE is now updated to version 1.28.
  • Perl can now be avoided entirely by importing the module ${modulesPath}/profiles/perlless.nix.
  • A new service for ALVR is available with the option programs.alvr.
  • Support for running AppImage programs directly is now available via programs.appimage.binfmt.
  • FCast Receiver is now available as programs.fcast-receiver.
  • Ory Keto is now packaged.
  • Sunshine now has a module available to use from services.sunshine.

24.05 breaking changes

  • akkoma now requires setttings."Pleroma.Upload".base_url to be set.
  • appimageTools.wrapAppImage now exports binaries as pname instead of ${pname}-${version}.
  • boot.supportedFilesystems and boot.initrd.supportedFilesystems are now attribute sets instead of lists.
  • cryptsetup has been upgraded, users should verify that their encryption setup is still working correctly.
  • inetutils has had its priority lowered to avoid shadowing util-linux.
  • lua’s LUA_PATH and LUA_CPATH are no longer overriden. Instead, LUA_ROOT is modified.
  • nixVersions.unstable has been replaced by nixVersions.latest and nixVersions.git.
  • pipewire and wireplumber can not be configured by setting files with environment.etc. Instead, their extraConfig and configPackages options should be used.
  • security.pam.enableSSHAgentAuth has been modified and users should verify whether their config needs to be updated.

Community Recap

Aside from the release of NixOS 24.05, we saw @tad announce a call for gradle2nix v2 testers. The project has been completely rewritten to be faster and more reliable. Any community members wanting to try out the new version can access it via the v2 branch on GitHub and can find a summary of changes documented here.

Last week also began the migration of Snowfall Lib users to v3. This release includes improved integration with Home-Manager, the ability to define homes for all matching system types instead of a single host, more flexible overlays, first-class namespace support, as well as NixOS and Home-Manager modules which are automatically added to configurations in order to provide additional context such as the current user or to pass through Home-Manager configuration.

Security fixes this week:

New packages added this week:

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