Hey everyone, we are Leona Maroni and Tristan Ross, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 25.05 “Warbler”.
NixOS is a Linux distribution. Its underlying package repository Nixpkgs can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS with the Nix package manager.
This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2025-12-31). The old release 24.11 “Vicuña” is now officially deprecated and will reach its end-of-life and stop receiving security updates after 2025-06-30.
The 25.05 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2857 contributors, who authored 57054 commits since the previous release.
Highlights
NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release of Nixpkgs
- Added 7840 new packages
- Updated 28054 existing packages
- Removed 1694 outdated packages, in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.
In addition to packages from Nixpkgs, the NixOS Linux distribution also features composable configuration modules and integration tests for distributed systems. This release of NixOS
- Added 137 new modules and 1930 configuration options
- Removed 10 outdated modules and 215 configuration options.
GNOME 48
GNOME has been updated to version 48 “Bengaluru”, which introduces notification stacking, a new music player, HDR support, and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.
Kernel
The default Linux kernel has been updated from 6.6 to 6.12. All supported kernels remain available.
C compilers
LLVM has been updated to version 19. GCC has been updated to version 14.
Special Thanks
We want to personally thank
- Seth and raf for editorializing the release notes
- Yohann Boniface for the release logo
- The NixOS infrastucture team for their dutifully tending to our build infrastructure
- The Nixpkgs staging team for supporting our staging cycles and the patient fixing of many build errors.
We also want to thank all contributors who made this release possible!
Reflections and closing
We are grateful for the opportunity to support the community as release managers and to learn about and participate in the release process. Seeing all the contributors working in their area of the project to improve it has been an exciting experience. We would like to thank everyone in the community for that. We are looking forward to the next release, NixOS 25.11 “Xantusia”.