Changes between Nix and Determinate Nix

This section lists the differences between upstream Nix 2.29 and Determinate Nix 3.6.2.

  • In Determinate Nix, flakes are stable. You no longer need to enable the flakes experimental feature.

  • In Determinate Nix, the new Nix CLI (i.e. the nix command) is stable. You no longer need to enable the nix-command experimental feature.

  • Determinate Nix has a setting json-log-path to send a copy of all Nix log messages (in JSON format) to a file or Unix domain socket.

  • Determinate Nix has made nix profile install an alias to nix profile add, a more symmetrical antonym of nix profile remove.

  • nix-channel and channel: url syntax (like channel:nixos-24.11) is deprecated, see: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-src/issues/34

  • Using indirect flake references and implicit inputs is deprecated, see: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-src/issues/37

  • Warnings around "dirty trees" are updated to reduce "dirty" jargon, and now refers to "uncommitted changes".

  • Tell users a source is corrupted ("cannot read file from tarball: Truncated tar archive detected while reading data"), improving over the previous 'cannot read file from tarball' error by @edolstra in DeterminateSystems/nix-src#64
  • Emit warnings when using import-from-derivation by setting the trace-import-from-derivation option to true by @gustavderdrache in DeterminateSystems/nix-src#70