Extremely large-scale MIMO (XL-MIMO) is a promising technology to improve the capacity for future 6G networks. With a very large number of antennas, the near-field property of XL-MIMO systems becomes dominant. Unlike the classical far-field line-of-sight (LoS) channel with only one available data stream, the significantly increased degrees of freedom (DoFs) are available in the near-field LoS channel. However, limited by the small number of radio frequency (RF) chains, the existing hybrid precoding architecture widely used for 5G is not able to fully exploit the extra DoFs in the near-field region. In this paper, the available DoFs and the capacity of the near-field LoS channel are theoretically analyzed at first. Then, to exploit the near-field effect as a new possibility for capacity improvement, the distance-aware precoding (DAP) scheme is proposed. We develop the DAP architecture, where a dedicated selection circuit is inserted to connect phase shifters and RF chains. Moreover, each RF chain can be flexibly configured to active or inactive according to the distance-related DoFs in the proposed DAP architecture. Based on the developed DAP architecture, a DAP algorithm is proposed to optimize the number of activated RF chains and precoding matrices to match the increased DoFs in the near-field region. Finally, simulation results verify that, the proposed DAP scheme can efficiently utilize the extra DoFs in the near-field region to improve the spectrum efficiency and the energy efficiency as well.