Hey everyone, we are yayayayaka and jopejoe1, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 26.05 “Yarara”.
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 2026-12-31). The old release 25.11 “Xantusia” is now officially deprecated and will reach its end-of-life and stop receiving security updates after 2026-06-30.
The 26.05 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2842 contributors, who authored 59703 commits since the previous release.
Highlights
Our vast and routinely maintained set of packages has also been updated. This release of Nixpkgs
- Added 20442 new packages
- Updated 20641 existing packages
- Removed 17532 outdated packages, in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.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 85 new modules and 1547 configuration options
- Removed 25 outdated modules and 355 configuration options.
systemd stage 1
Stage 1 (a.k.a. initrd) is now based on systemd by default, and the old scripted implementation is deprecated and scheduled for removal in 26.11.
Deprecation of x86_64-darwin
This will be the last release of Nixpkgs to support x86_64-darwin. Platform support will be maintained and binaries built until Nixpkgs 26.05 goes out of support at the end of 2026. For 26.11, due to Apple’s deprecation of the platform and limited build infrastructure and developer time, we will no longer build packages for x86_64-darwin or support building them from source.
GNOME 50
GNOME has been updated to version 50 “Tokyo”, introducing accessibility enhancements, display handling improvements and more. Refer to the release notes for more details.
C compilers
GCC has been updated to version 15. LLVM remains at version 21.
Special Thanks
We want to personally thank
- Bryan Honof and raf for editorializing the release notes
- Yohann Boniface for the release logo
- The NixOS infrastructure 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 26.11 “Zokor”.