21.11 Has Been Released!

Hey everyone, it’s Timothy DeHerrera and Tom Bereknyei, the release managers for 21.11. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.11 “Porcupine”.

The 21.11 release was possible due to the efforts of 1541 contributors in 41960 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Sandro Jäckel, Fabian Affolter, Martin Weinelt, figsoda, Artturin, Mario Rodas, Bobby Rong, Jörg Thalheim, Robert Schütz, Michael Weiss.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages and we expect this trend to continue.

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of NixOS happens a month before the planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: Fabian Affolter, Sandro Jäckel, figsoda, Sergei Trofimovich, Artturin, Alyssa Ross, Thiago Kenji Okada, Lukas Epple, Tredwell, Bernardo
Meurer
, and 477 others!

Special Thanks

Thanks to Domen Kožar for revitalizing the Darwin support effort. Jon Ringer for guiding the release process since NixOS 20.09. Vladimír Čunát and Martin Weinelt for their continued efforts managing and stabilizing staging. Thanks to Graham Christensen for organizing with Equinix Metal to ensure we have enough compute resources.

Reflections and Closing

The influx of additional interest in Nix/NixOS is exciting to see. The fairly smooth release cycle is due to the dedication and time of all the volunteers in the community. The continued growth and improvements have been incredible to witness.

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Congratulations to everyone! Thank you for the hard work and dedication of the release managers, @jonringer, @nrdxp, @tomberek!

This might be our most up-to-date release ever with 85.1% of our 33,435 not-unique-to-nixpkgs packages up to date. This is the first time I’ve seen a stable release surpass the AUR on both freshness and number of packages on Repology!

20 Likes

Wow! We have moderation drama, flakes drama, 2.4 drama, etc., and so recently I’ve felt somewhat sad and worried. It’s nice to feel happy again seeing our unsung heros doing the less glamorous work in Nixpkgs itself continue to crush it. Great job!!!

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YES!!!

Upgrade from 21.05 to 21.11 went flawless!

Thank you very much everyone :slight_smile:

Thank you Nixos!

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Now they have to create zoomed-in graphs due to almost all distros getting squashed too close together :slight_smile:

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Am I reading the manual correctly, that if you’re already on the nixos-unstable channel, there’s no need to do anything?

Nixos releases are essentially fixing the builds on master. Then branching off from there. There shouldn’t be much to do if you were following nixos unstable prior to a release being cut.

3 Likes