Yesterday, GNU Guix, a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system, announced the release of GNU Guix version 1.0.0. or “One-point-oh”.
This release includes ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries. Guix users can update by running guix pull.
According to their official post, the team says that, “For Guix, 1.0 is the result of seven years of development, with code, packaging, and documentation contributions made by 260 people, translation work carried out by a dozen of people, and artwork and web site development by a couple of individuals, to name some of the activities that have been happening. During those years we published no less than 19 “0.x” releases.”
This release, the team says, is a major milestone for those who’ve been on board for several years.
Highlights of GNU Guix 1.0.0
On December 6, last year, the GNU Guix team released the 0.16.0 version where 99 people contributed over 5,700 commits at that time. This new One-point-oh release includes the following highlights since the previous version.
- Hassle-free system installation: The ISO installation image now runs a text-mode graphical installer, which makes system installation less tedious than it was before. The installer is fully translated to French, German, and Spanish.
- Improved user interface: This release includes aliases for common operations such as guix search and guix install. Diagnostics are now colorized, more operations show a progress bar, there’s a new –verbosity option recognized by all commands, and most commands are now “quiet” by default.
- New package transformation: There’s a new –with-git-url package transformation option, that goes with –with-branch and –with-commit.
- Guix now has a uniform mechanism to configure keyboard layout—a long overdue addition. Also, Xorg configuration has been streamlined with the new xorg-configuration record.
- guix pack -R: This creates tarballs containing relocatable application bundles that rely on user namespaces. Starting from 1.0, guix pack -RR generates relocatable binaries that fall back to PRoot on systems where user namespaces are not supported.
- Package addition and updates: More than 1,100 packages were added, leading to close to 10,000 packages, 2,104 packages were updated, and several system services were contributed.
- Multiple language availability: The manual has been fully translated to French, the German and Spanish translations are nearing completion. They have also planned to add a Simplified Chinese translation. One can also help translate the manual into their language by joining the Translation Project.
The team also says that Guix 1.0 is a tool that’s both serviceable for one’s day-to-day computer usage and a great playground to explore. Whether users want to help on design, coding, maintenance, system administration, translation, testing, artwork, web services, funding, organizing a Guix install party, the team is welcome to contributions.
To know more about the GNU Guix 1.0.0 in detail, read the official blog post.
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