After more than three years of development the release of the package manager GNU Guix 1.5 and the GNU/Linux distribution built on its basis – Guix System – took place. In the future, new releases of GNU Guix decided will be released once a year. For downloading generated images for installation on USB Flash (972 MB) and use in virtualization systems (1.4 GB). Supports operation on i686, x86_64, Power9, armv7, riscv64 and aarch64 architectures.
The distribution allows installation as a stand-alone OS in virtualization systems, in containers both on conventional hardware and launch in already installed GNU/Linux distributions, acting as a platform for deploying applications. The user is provided with features such as dependency accounting, reproducible assembly, work without root, rollback to previous versions in case of problems, configuration management and environment cloning (creating an exact copy of the software environment on other computers).
Basic News:
- Added experimental support for the GNU Hurd kernel (x86_64-gnu). Added an option to the installer to use Hurd instead of the Linux kernel.
- Added support for the RISC-V architecture (riscv64-linux).
- The GNOME session has been updated to the GNOME 46 release (the previous release shipped with GNOME 42) and has been set to use Wayland by default. The modularity of the gnome-desktop-service-type service has been expanded, in which you can now customize the list of default GNOME applications.
- A new plasma-desktop-service-type service has been added to create an environment with the KDE Plasma 6.5 desktop environment.
- The ability to run a Guix background process without root privileges has been provided. When installing on distributions other than Guix System, the default mode is rootless. In existing installations, this mode can be activated by setting
“(privileged? #f)” in guix-configuration. The mode is implemented using the user namespace and AppArmor profiles. - Backends for GraphML and CycloneDX JSON have been added to the “guix graph” command, which allows you to use it to generate full-fledged SBOM (Software Bill of Material).
- To the command “guix shell” added “–nesting” options to use Guix in a container and “–emulate-fhs” to run applications using a file system structure that complies with the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) specification.
