GNU Guix 1.0.0 released

We are excited to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.0.0!

The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries. Guix users can update by running guix pull.

Guix 1.0!

One-point-oh always means a lot for free software releases. 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.

The journey to 1.0

We took our time to get there, which is quite unusual in an era where free software moves so fast. Why did we take this much time? First, it takes time to build a community around a GNU/Linux distribution, and a distribution wouldn’t really exist without it. Second, we feel like we’re contributing an important piece to the GNU operating system, and that is surely intimidating and humbling.

Last, we’ve been building something new. Of course we stand on the shoulders of giants, and in particular Nix, which brought the functional software deployment paradigm that Guix implements. But developing Guix has been—and still is!—a challenge in many ways: it’s a programming language design challenge, an operating system design challenge, a challenge for security, reproducibility, bootstrapping, usability, and more. In other words, it’s been a long but insightful journey! :-)

What GNU Guix can do for you

Presumably some of the readers are discovering Guix today, so let’s recap what Guix can do for you as a user. Guix is a complete toolbox for software deployment in general, which makes it different from most of the tools you may be familiar with.

Guix manages packages, environments, containers, and systems.

This may sound a little abstract so let’s look at concrete use cases:

The quick reference card shows the important commands. As you start diving deeper into Guix, you’ll discover that many aspects of the system are exposed using consistent Guile programming interfaces: package definitions, system services, the “init” system, and a whole bunch of system-level libraries. We believe that makes the system very hackable, and we hope you’ll find it as much fun to play with as we do.

So much for the overview!

What’s new since 0.16.0

For those who’ve been following along, a great many things have changed over the last 5 months since the 0.16.0 release—99 people contributed over 5,700 commits during that time! Here are the highlights:

That’s a long list already, but you can find more details in the NEWS file.

What’s next?

One-point-oh is a major milestone, especially for those of us who’ve been on board for several years. But with the wealth of ideas we’ve been collecting, it’s definitely not the end of the road!

If you’re interested in “devops” and distributed deployment, you will certainly be happy to help in that area, those interested in OS development might want to make the Shepherd more flexible and snappy, furthering integration with Software Heritage will probably be #1 on the to-do list of scientists concerned with long-term reproducibility, programming language tinkerers may want to push G-expressions further, etc. Guix 1.0 is a tool that’s both serviceable for one’s day-to-day computer usage and a great playground for the tinkerers among us.

Whether you want to help on design, coding, maintenance, system administration, translation, testing, artwork, web services, funding, organizing a Guix install party… your contributions are welcome!

We’re humans—don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, and enjoy Guix 1.0!

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the kernel Linux, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.

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