The only linux distro where I've never experienced disruption whatsoever when a new version comes in. A testament to the validity of the approach they are using (immutability). They also have a simple way to package things, and this produced the largest repository of packages of any linux distro. If something works, it stays working, breakage after updating is unheard of. The unofficial motto is "nixos fixes that."
NixOS 25.11 released
61–67 of 67 posts
Re: NixOS 25.11 released
#62The only linux distro where I've never experienced disruption whatsoever when a new version comes in. A testament to the validity of the approach they are using (immutability). They also have a simple way to package things, and this produced the largest repository of packages of any linux distro. If something works, it stays working, breakage after updating is unheard of. The unofficial motto is "nixos fixes that."
Forgot to mention Nvidia CUDA is now a first-class citizen. Nix becomes a support target for Nvidia. How times have changed, thanks to Google scaring the bejezus of Nvidia by running Gemini on their TPUs. Nvidia may finally get their act together on linux
Re: NixOS 25.11 released
#63> Added nixos-init, a Rust-based bashless initialization system for systemd initrd Rust is such a heavy dependency though, is it not? Is it worth it? Additionally, what does it add as a new project / software (disregard Rust here)? What was wrong with the previous one and/or what does this fix or add that justifies adding a heavy dependency? Seems like most of these projects are written in Rust though.
Previous version was in bash. With this change you can build a nixos image not containing bash or any shell whatsoever. Not having interpreted languages on the system at all is an effective hardening technique combined with verity store containing all your executables as it makes it impossible for attackers to add new executable files to the system which stops almost all attack vectors. You can read about the project…
> makes it impossible for attackers to add new executable files to the system which stops almost all attack vectors
If you have code execution - any kind - you have code execution. It really doesn't matter if a shell is available or not, you're always an open(2), write(2), and execve(2) away from creating and invoking a new executable, or just mmap(2)ing a new executable region in the current process. Yes, most exploits leverage a shell because it's convenient, so you're making it a little bit more annoying by having to first write an executable, but it really doesn't stop attacks like this.
Much more effective measures are those that prevent program takeover in the first place (SSP, ASLR), and things like W^X.
Re: NixOS 25.11 released
#64> 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?
Instability is one of the biggest but perhaps also the least understood downsides of NixOS, IMHO. Contrary to the name, even the stable branch of NixOS can have problems while installing routine updates with `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade`. In fairness, at least with NixOS you can normally roll back to a previous working configuration where you can try to fix or work around the problem if that does happen. It’s stil…
Very interesting to read this. I've never had breakage, but now I'm questioning whether this is the exception, not the rule.
On ubuntu, every new version broke something, sometimes updates make the computer boot to a blank screen... it was a terrible experince for early-days linux users. This was many years ago, but it made me distrust most distros I tried. Except for nixos.
Re: NixOS 25.11 released
#65I’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've been on a similar journey this past month, although it sounds like mine went a little more successfully. I've managed to get a repo setup which contains a nix flake with nix-darwin configuration, and it also calls into some home-manager modules which I also use on a linux device as well. I do agree, the nix language isn't particularly to my taste either.
I know you're hoping to go from first principals but I'm happy to share the repo if you want (email in my profile).
Aside from that, what issues did you run into? I'm keen to know if I've just not gone deep enough and will soon hit something.
Re: NixOS 25.11 released
#66Does 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.
https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/ is a great guide to Nix with Flakes.
This was the Nix config that helped it 'click' for me: https://github.com/eh8/chenglab that mentions this guide.
I based my own config off of it https://github.com/richardgill/nix
Re: NixOS 25.11 released
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instability is one of the biggest but perhaps also the least understood downsides of NixOS, IMHO. Contrary to the name, even the stable branch of NixOS can have problems while installing routine updates with `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade`. In fairness, at least with NixOS you can normally roll back to a previous working configuration where you can try to fix or work around the problem if that does happen. It’s stil…
Very interesting to read this. I've never had breakage, but now I'm questioning whether this is the exception, not the rule. On ubuntu, every new version broke something, sometimes updates make the computer boot to a blank screen... it was a terrible experince for early-days linux users. This was many years ago, but it made me distrust most distros I tried. Except for nixos.
I can only speak anecdotally, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve just been unlucky with this particular box, but I’ve seen a few quite serious issues going back over the past few years since I switched to NixOS as my primary OS.
Not so long ago there was some sort of problem with Hydra builds for a recent version of Node. That seemed to result in trying to build the whole thing locally on every update, taking a huge amount of time and then typically failing there as well.
I’ve seen things with Nvidia drivers vs Linux kernel versions as well. We did have a specific reason for choosing Nvidia for that particular workstation, but otherwise, I’d agree with popular advice to get AMD if you’re building a Linux box, just based on the frequency and severity of Nvidia driver issues we’ve seen here.
I’ve seen a few issues with Ubuntu upgrades over the years as well, and wouldn’t necessarily rate that much higher for stability. That’s always surprised me because IME Debian Stable is the gold standard — something I’ve trusted with our production servers for well over a decade now, from unattended upgrades to several major new releases, and barely seen a flicker of a hint of anything breaking in all that time. To be fair, I haven’t used Debian much on workstations, so I don’t know whether the kinds of issues I’ve experienced with NixOS and Ubuntu would have been more common if I had.