After three years in development, GNU Guix 1.5 has been released, marking the start of a newly adopted annual release cycle. But if this name has flown under your radar, let me briefly explain what it is before we move on to the news.
First and foremost, Guix is both a transactional package manager and a full GNU/Linux distribution built around it. As a package manager, guix can be installed on top of most existing Linux systems, where it operates independently of native tools like apt or dnf.
At the same time, Guix System is a standalone operating system (Linux distro) that uses the same technology to declaratively manage the entire OS, including the kernel, system services, and user environments.
Does that mean bootless kernel updates?
If so, between that and declarative configuration, it sounds way better than I envisioned the product was going to be.
Yeah, I think that’s what that means. How it works is that you will reconfigure your system, which will load the new version into kexec. Then you can simply launch
reboot --kexecto switch to your new system, including the new kernel.