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NixOS 25.11 released

nixos.org

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Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#51

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

gouggoug wrote: post #15
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 g…

I had the same reaction my first year. I found the NixOS documentation to be very poor and the lack of a single set of best practices (e.g., imperative, declarative, home config, flakes) to be frustrating.

I switched a couple devices to Guix and was at first encouraged by their much better docs, but the lack of features and battle testing has been a problem with longer use.

I've mostly been happy to go back to NixOS thanks to LLMs. Even a year ago, AI was very good at updating Nix configs and fixing any errors. Ideally Nix would have better docs and a more intuitive unified config system, but LLMs have made it usable and the best solution for now.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#52

Post by dayjah »

viraptor wrote: post #47
dayjah wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But did that happen while updating from the same stable channel? I get things could change when switching releases.

Pretty sure I just ran a nix flake update.

Here are the links from my journal:

This went into nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/376988

Which then changed the api between and broke this: https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/nix/n...

The fix took a few hours, I happened to be one of the first folks bit by it: https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/pull/1318

I also have in my notes that Emilazy is a super star: https://github.com/emilazy

Notes on how I worked around it for the time it was broken:

> To work around it on myside I tried various things. Fundamentally I rolled back to nixpkgs-24.11-darwin which needed corresponding changes to nix-darwin (nix-darwin-24.11) and home-manager (release-24.11) to get everything working.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#53

Post by beefnugs »

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.

For certain people i think "entry level" for nix means trying to re-read tutorials every couple of years and it never ever feeling comfortable or memorable... but somehow it still itches in the back of your mind that this is how things are suppose to be done. But why is it so... different?

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#54

Post by kurtis_reed »

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.

Apparently not

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#55

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

nh2 wrote: post #40
evil-olive wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The nix language is also really unpalatable to me. yeah, I wish I could give you some "it gets better" good news, but... I've used NixOS as my daily driver for ~10 years, including the laptop I'm typing this on. I love NixOS-the-OS, I love nixpkgs-the-ecosystem. but I still hate Nix-the-language. it's like Perl and Haskell had a drunken hookup that produced a child. and then abandoned that child in the forest where…

Which part of the nix language looks like Perl? I actually find the language simple and easy to learn: It's just untyped lambda calculus with dicts and lists. (I, too, would like static types though.)

I'm not them, but TIMTOWTDI is a bad thing, and Nix suffers from it. That's the main Perl-ism I can think of.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#56

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

yearolinuxdsktp wrote: post #45

> The old release 25.05 “Warbler” is now officially deprecated and will reach its end-of-life and stop receiving security updates after 2025-12-31. What, one month to upgrade to keep receiving security updates? How can you force 1-month upgrade windows every 6 months and who would go for that?

NixOS is mostly a rolling-release distro, like Arch, but it rolls a bit more slowly. You can opt into full rolling release with the "unstable" branch, which is very common. There's not a lot of benefit to "stable" IMO.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#57

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #56
yearolinuxdsktp wrote: post #45

> The old release 25.05 “Warbler” is now officially deprecated and will reach its end-of-life and stop receiving security updates after 2025-12-31. What, one month to upgrade to keep receiving security updates? How can you force 1-month upgrade windows every 6 months and who would go for that?

NixOS is mostly a rolling-release distro, like Arch, but it rolls a bit more slowly. You can opt into full rolling release with the "unstable" branch, which is very common. There's not a lot of benefit to "stable" IMO.

Er, no it isn't? Yes, unstable is rolling, but otherwise it has releases, like 25.11, which contain breaking changes. It cuts new releases quite quickly and drops old ones fast, but that doesn't make it a rolling distro.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#58

Post by notfed »

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.

No, but I can empathize. I never understood the Nix language. It's impenetrable to me. I hate it so much.

I keep checking back every year or so secretly hoping they'll have upgraded the language. It's fascinating how successful Nix is given how utterly opaque the language is.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#59

Post by bomewish »

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…

Have been down this path and just realised: I get the same result and a lot less of a hassle by just using bash scripts and brewfile etc.

Making a change with home manager became a whole thing.

Now I’m back on the happy path and it’s great. The LLMs can also move things over very fast.

My remaining uses of nix are just devbox which is a very palatable wrapper and nicer to use than flakes.

Re: NixOS 25.11 released

#60

Post by rkomorn »

jchw wrote: post #44
rkomorn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. As soon as lanzaboote works with stable, I'll go back to stable (but I think that is not the case yet, sadly). Lowkey plug for lanzaboote though. Getting secure boot working went pretty well for me thanks to it.

Does Secure Boot with NixOS even make sense? In an ordinary Secure Boot setup, you get the kernel/initrd/etc. with signatures from a trusted vendor, but with NixOS it is going to obviously sign everything locally. That means that you are not protected against bootkits and a root compromise is still just as bad as ever. I suppose in combination with LUKS you could at least prevent evil maid attacks, to the extent that…

To be honest, for me it boiled down to "I don't have to type in my LUKS password by hand" combined with some intellectual curiosity.

I didn't have some strong security-driven mindset behind it.

That said I did also lock down my BIOS with a password (to prevent disabling secure boot).

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