GNU Guix 1.2 Adds Btrfs Subvolume Booting, New GNU Hurd Options

GNU Guix 1.2 is out today as both an update to the cross-platform package manager as well as the Guix System Linux distribution.

This release comes after being in development the past half-year and also on the 8th anniversary of this GNU project. GNU Guix 1.2 comes with new features, performance improvements, and many fixes to the package manager as well as the GNU/Linux system distribution.

On the package manager side, guix pull now cryptographically authenticates channels, there is also support for authenticating Git checkouts, faster build times thanks to the Guile 3.0.4 baseline compiler, and a wide variety of options and new sub-commands for this transactional package manager.

On the distribution side the bootstrap binary seeds are down to just 60 MiB for x86_64/i686, new GNU Hurd options are available, the Guix System can be booted from a Btrfs sub-volume, Linux-libre kernel modules are now Gzip-compressed, the graphical installer has various improvements, support for running the root file-system on NFS, and there are 1,999 new packages and 3,652 updated packages. Among the new services available on the Guix system are AutoSSH, Hurd-VM, LXQt, zRAM, and many others.

More details on the GNU Guix 1.2 release via GNU.org.