Presented is the release of the NixOS 25.11 distribution kit, based on the Nix package manager and providing its own developments for simplifying system setup and maintenance. In NixOS, all system configuration is done through a single system configuration file, configuration.nix. Provides options for quickly rolling back the system to a previous version of the configuration and switching between different system states. Installation of individual packages by individual users and the ability to simultaneously use several versions of one program are supported. Reproducible builds are provided. For x86_64 and ARM64 architectures, installation images with a graphical environment (3.6 GB) and a shortened console version (1.5 GB) have been prepared.
When using Nix, the result of building packages is stored in a separate subdirectory in /nix/store. For example, after building, a firefox package might be written to /nix/store/8onlv1pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ed5c4-firefox-145.0.1/, where “8onlv1pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ed5c4” is a hash of all its dependencies and build instructions. Installing a package means building it or downloading an already assembled one (provided that it has already been built on Hydra – the NixOS project build service), as well as creating a directory with symbolic links to all packages in the system or user profile, and then adding this directory to the PATH list. A similar approach is used in the GNU Guix package manager, which is based on Nix developments. The collection of packages is presented in a special repository Nixpkgs.
Main innovations:
- 7002 packages added, 6338 packages were removed, 25252 packages were updated. Added 107 new modules and 1778