Software Update: NixOS 21.11

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NixOS is a Linux distribution with a package manager that allows you to make the configuration declarative, rather than build from a sequence of commands and configuration files. Under the hood, Nix uses a functional programming language to define the system or configuration. Nix was conceived by Eelco Dolstra, a Dutch computer scientist who obtained his PhD on NixOS from the University of Utrecht. More information about NixOS can be found on our own forum. Tuesday is version 21.11 of NixOS and the most important changes that have been made are listed for you below.

Highlights

  • The default Nix version remains at 2.3.16. Nix has not been updated to version 2.4 due to regressions in non-experimental behavior. To upgrade to 2.4, use the nixos-unstable branch or set the nix.package option to either of nixFlakes or nix_2_4 packages. The nixUnstable attribute is a pre-release of Nix 2.5. Read the release notes for more information on upcoming changes. Please help us improve Nix by providing any breakage reports
  • iptables now uses nf_tables backend.
  • PHP now defaults to PHP 8.0, updated from 7.4.
  • kops now defaults to 1.21.1, which uses containerd as the default runtime.
  • python3 now defaults to Python 3.9, updated from Python 3.8.
  • PostgreSQL now defaults to major version 13.
  • spark now defaults to spark 3, updated from 2. A migration guide are available.
  • Improvements have been made to the Hadoop module and package:
    • HDFS and YARN now support production-ready highly available deployments with automatic failover.
    • Hadoop now defaults to Hadoop 3, updated from 2.
    • JournalNode, ZKFS and HTTPFS services have been added.
  • Activation scripts can now, optionally, be run during a nixos-rebuild dry-activate and can detect the dry activation by reading $NIXOS_ACTION. This allows activation scripts to output what they would change if the activation was really run. The users/modules activation script supports this and outputs some of is actions.
  • KDE Plasma now finally works on Wayland.
  • bash now defaults to major version 5.
  • Systemd was updated to version 249 (from 247).
  • Pantheon desktop has been updated to version 6. Due to changes of screen locker, if locking doesn’t work for you, please try gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.lockdown disable-lock-screen false.
  • kubernetes-helm now defaults to 3.7.0, which introduced some breaking changes to the experimental OCI manifest format. see HIP 6 for more details. helmfile also defaults to 0.141.0, which is the minimum compatible version.
  • GNOME has been upgraded to 41. Please take a look at their Release Notes for details.
  • LXD support was greatly improved:
    • building LXD images from configurations is now directly possible with just nixpkgs
    • hydra is now building nixOS LXD images that can be used standalone with full nixos-rebuild support
  • OpenSSH was updated to version 8.8p1
    • This breaks connections to old SSH daemons as ssh-rsa host keys and ssh-rsa public keys that were signed with SHA-1 are disabled by default now
    • These can be re-enabled, see the OpenSSH changelog for details
  • ORY Kratos was updated to version 0.8.0-alpha.3
    • This release requires you to run SQL migrations. Please, as always, create a backup of your database first!
    • The SDKs are now generated with tag v0alpha2 to reflect that some signatures have changed in a breaking fashion. Please update your imports from v0alpha1 to v0alpha2.
    • The SMTPS scheme used in courier config URL with cleartext/StartTLS/TLS SMTP connection types is now only supporting implicit TLS. For StartTLS and cleartext SMTP, please use the SMTP scheme instead.
    • for more details, see Release Notes

Version number 21.11
Release status Final
Operating systems Linux
Website NixOS
Download
License type Conditions (GNU/BSD/etc.)
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