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NixOS 25.11 released

nixos.org

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Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#11

Post by exe34 »

viraptor wrote: post #8
foxheadman wrote: post #5

Reading the NixOS release notes every 6 months is how I learn about new software that I might want to try: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes#sec-rele... For my first few years of NixOS I didn't understand the point of the NixOS stable releases, since even on "nixos-unstable" I found that if my nix config evaluates, then it'll work. And in the very rare case things broke, I could easily rollback. Nix…

There's still the data migration issue. If you follow unstable all the time, an app may update its data files or databases at startup. Then, you can still roll back the binaries, but they'll just refuse to work (best case) or corrupt the unknown data format (worst case).

You can still roll-forward specific apps - use the up to date ones if you really need to.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#12

Post by telotortium »

foxheadman wrote: post #5

Reading the NixOS release notes every 6 months is how I learn about new software that I might want to try: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes#sec-rele... For my first few years of NixOS I didn't understand the point of the NixOS stable releases, since even on "nixos-unstable" I found that if my nix config evaluates, then it'll work. And in the very rare case things broke, I could easily rollback. Nix…

Following up on this, has anyone tried this and seen how well it works in practice?

“ Speedify, a proprietary VPN which allows combining multiple internet connections (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, Ethernet, Starlink, Satellite, and more) to improve the stability, speed, and security of online experiences. Available as services.speedify.”

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#13

Post by [deleted] »

dayjah wrote: post #2

I’m about 18mos into managing my macOS hardware with Nix. And I’m conflicted. It’s clearly a powerful system, and I’m still very noob at it. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right solution for macOS. I’ve not felt comfortable enough with it to roll it to Linux hosts yet. Or use its docker image maker. Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake up…

[deleted]

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#14

Post by digdugdirk »

Does anyone have a good resource for a quickstart/high-level overview of just the terminology required to understand Nix? Flakes/overlays/nixpkgs/etc. I start wading in to try and understand it, and instead run into arguments and disagreements.

Unfortunately, without a base level understanding of the entire ecosystem, I stay lost.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#15

Post by gouggoug »

dayjah wrote: post #2

I’m about 18mos into managing my macOS hardware with Nix. And I’m conflicted. It’s clearly a powerful system, and I’m still very noob at it. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right solution for macOS. I’ve not felt comfortable enough with it to roll it to Linux hosts yet. Or use its docker image maker. Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake up…

This past month, I have spent a decent amount of hours (7+) trying to setup nix on my mac with nix-darwin, and failed.

Most tutorial out there encourage you to download someone else's configuration to get going. I don't want to do that. I want to understand at its core how this thing works.

I've read the official nix language documentation, watched YouTube tutorials, read 3rd party tutorials, and still couldn't get going with a simple configuration that would install a few packages.

The nix language is also really unpalatable to me. But I could deal with that if the examples out there showed a consistent way of doing things – that's not the case. It seems one same thing can be done many different ways – but I want to know and do it the right way. I would generally turn myself to the official best practices documentation, except nix' is very short and doesn't help much.

I really want to use nix. There's no question about its advantages. But nix just won't let me (or maybe I'm too old to learn new things).

That being said, I'll probably give it another try this month...

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#16

Post by sestep »

dayjah wrote: post #2

I’m about 18mos into managing my macOS hardware with Nix. And I’m conflicted. It’s clearly a powerful system, and I’m still very noob at it. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right solution for macOS. I’ve not felt comfortable enough with it to roll it to Linux hosts yet. Or use its docker image maker. Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake up…

(disclaimer: self-plug)

I similarly found `nix flake update` frustrating for a while, especially when using unstable Nixpkgs. I wrote a tool called `npc` that basically solved the problem for me by letting me bisect whatever Nixpkgs channel(s) I have in my flake inputs: https://github.com/samestep/npc

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#18

Post by para_parolu »

digdugdirk wrote: post #14

Does anyone have a good resource for a quickstart/high-level overview of just the terminology required to understand Nix? Flakes/overlays/nixpkgs/etc. I start wading in to try and understand it, and instead run into arguments and disagreements. Unfortunately, without a base level understanding of the entire ecosystem, I stay lost.

I started playing with nix few months ago. Youtube videos from Vimjoyer helped a lot. On top of that Claude Code is very good at understanding/explaining/updating config.

Regarding features: so far for my home setup (few vms on proxmox) I only needed flakes. They age good at organizing multihost config.

But besides it it works smoothly. And I constantly have thought “wait, why we didn’t always do it this way?”

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#19

Post by dayjah »

viraptor wrote: post #9
dayjah wrote: post #2

I’m about 18mos into managing my macOS hardware with Nix. And I’m conflicted. It’s clearly a powerful system, and I’m still very noob at it. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right solution for macOS. I’ve not felt comfortable enough with it to roll it to Linux hosts yet. Or use its docker image maker. Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake up…

> period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync What do you mean? Those should be fairly independent in practice.

In practice nix-darwin relies on being a drop in, which means maintaining compatibility with api surface which in the proper nixpkgs world is a closed loop. There are several cases of this breaking since 2020 or so.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#20

Post by dayjah »

tstrimple wrote: post #3
dayjah wrote: post #2

I’m about 18mos into managing my macOS hardware with Nix. And I’m conflicted. It’s clearly a powerful system, and I’m still very noob at it. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right solution for macOS. I’ve not felt comfortable enough with it to roll it to Linux hosts yet. Or use its docker image maker. Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake up…

I've only barely used Nix on OSX to manage packages and I thought it felt awkward at the time. But I had also barely used NixOS at that time. Today I'm happily running NixOS on my NAS and my "gaming" desktop. My son is running it for his desktop as well. What feels awkward and fragile on OSX is far more stable on NixOS. But you do have to learn some of the Nix syntax and ways of doing things which it sounds like you'…

My principle of adoption was essentially this but in reverse; use it on the system I use the most (macOS), learn, and then use my niche knowledge to apply it to less frequently used computers like my gaming rig.

Along the way I acquired enough talent that use at work seemed reasonable.

As time has gone on, however, I have found things like the stringent need for everything to be built results in archaic packages versions in nixpkgs, etc., while core waits to bump the rustc version. Thus my return to using brew for almost everything albeit managed via nix-homebrew.

Case in point: I use zed, which relies on cutting edge rust features, which nix cannot deploy because of stability concerns. Everyone is right in this situation, but that left me with an archaic version of zed until I moved to the homebrew version.

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