Translations:FAQ/72/en

• nixos-unstable
  • description Use this when you want the latest package and module versions while still benefiting from the binary cache. You can use this channel on non-NixOS systems. This channel corresponds to NixOS’s main development branch, and may thus see radical changes between channel updates. This channel is not recommended for production systems.
  • definition this channel is updated depending on release.nix and release-lib.nix
• nixos-unstable-small
  • description This channel is identical to nixos-unstable described above, except that this channel contains fewer binary packages. This means the channel gets updated faster than nixos-unstable (for instance, when a critical security patch is committed to NixOS’s source tree). However, the binary cache may contain less binary packages and thus using this channel may require building more packages from source than nixos-unstable. This channel is mostly intended for server environments and as such contains few GUI applications.
  • definition this channel is updated depending on release-small.nix and release-lib.nix
• nixos-YY.MM (where YY is a 2-digit year and MM is a 2-digit month, such as nixos-17.03)
  • description These channels are called stable and only get conservative bug fixes and package upgrades. For instance, a channel update may cause the Linux kernel on your system to be upgraded from 3.4.66 to 3.4.67 (a minor bug fix), but not from 3.4.x to 3.11.x (a major change that has the potential to break things). Stable channels are generally maintained until the next stable branch is created.
  • definition this channel is updated depending on release.nix and release-lib.nix
• nixos-YY.MM-small (where YY is a 2-digit year and MM is a 2-digit month, such as nixos-15.09-small)
  • description The difference between nixos-YY.MM-small and nixos-YY.MM is the same as the one between nixos-unstable-small and nixos-unstable (see above)