NixOS 23.11 released

⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zone to Linux@lemmy.ml – 155 points –
Blog → Announcements | Nix & NixOS
nixos.org
41

You are viewing a single comment

There's no command to just update all packages without changing the nixos version?

Update your channel & rebuild

Is that the equivalent to apt update and apt upgrade? I don't want to apt dist-upgrade lol

When not using flakes, nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade is equivalent to apt update; apt upgrade. The equivalent to dist-upgrade is nix-channel add $NEW-CHANNEL-URL nixos and then performing a regular update.

Thanks. I've done switch many times after editing my config file. I've never added --upgrade!

I'm a bit confused about what you actually want? Do you just want to update your packages, but stay on the same NixOS version? Just continue like before. Do you want to stay on your current version, but use some packages from the next version? That should also be possible if you somehow include that channel in your configuration.nix (though I don't know how this would work in practice).

Personally, I just run with unstable though, then the releases aren't that important.

I think I thought unstable would mean, well, unstable. Like nightly releases or something. Would you use unstable for Firefox?

I think unstable and the fixed versions use the same Firefox package, so you wouldn't gain anything. The difference is rather in libraries that get used and how the distribution does things. For example, the changes listed in https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes#sec-release-23.11-incompatibilities just appeared mostly one by one for me; one day, I wanted to update my system and got the error that the fonts option got renamed, so I had to change my configuration.

The fonts.fonts and fonts.enableDefaultFonts options have been renamed to fonts.packages and fonts.enableDefaultPackages respectively.

While when using a fixed point release, these changes won't happen. Only when you switch releases. That's what "unstable" refers to.