Hey everyone, we are jopejoe1 and Leona Maroni, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 25.11 “Xantusia”.
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 2026-06-30). 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.
The 25.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2742 contributors, who authored 59430 commits since the previous release.
Highlights
Our vast and routinely maintained set of packages has also been updated. This release of Nixpkgs
- Added 7002 new packages
- Updated 25252 existing packages
- Removed 6338 outdated packages, in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.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 107 new modules and 1778 configuration options
- Removed 41 outdated modules and 807 configuration options.
GNOME 49
GNOME has been updated to version 49 “Brescia”, which removes X11 session support, introduces a new video player, a new document viewer, a redesigned calendar and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.
C compilers
LLVM has been updated to version 21. GCC remains at version 14. CMake was updated to version 4.
Special Thanks
We want to personally thank
- Seth and dish 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 26.05 “Yarara”.