2025 NixOS Community Survey Report

Announcements
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Hello everyone! :wave:

On behalf of the NixOS Marketing Team, we’re happy to announce that survey results now have a permanent home on the NixOS website: NixOS Surveys

First up: the full report for the 2025 NixOS Community Survey at 2025 Community Survey Results

The survey ran from September 1 to December 15, 2025 and drew 3,399 complete responses, a 48% increase over the 2,290 we received in 2024. Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond!

What’s in the report

The report turns the responses into interactive charts across seven sections: People, Technology, Experience, Workplace, Contribution, Foundation, and Information seeking. A few highlights to get you started:

  • The community is new and growing. 28.9% of respondents started using Nix within the past year, and 82.5% have under four years of experience.
  • NixOS is the front door to the ecosystem. 70.8% heard of NixOS before Nix itself, 78.4% first installed Nix through NixOS, and YouTube is the single largest discovery channel (28.3%).
  • Flakes are everywhere, in both senses. Flakes (78.9%) and the new nix CLI (66.7%) are by far the most-used experimental features, and flakes also top the list of areas respondents most want improved (50.3%), alongside error messages (47.6%) and the reference manual (41.5%).

There’s much more in the full report: demographics, hardware and platform targets, contribution patterns, upgrade experiences, and how people find help.

About the data

We take respondent privacy seriously: only aggregated and anonymized results are published, and raw responses are never released. The data pipeline, chart code, and the site itself are available at GitHub - NixOS/surveys · GitHub. Issues and pull requests are welcome, and you can build and hack on the site locally without access to any raw data.

We could use your help

This survey is put together by a handful of volunteers on the NixOS Marketing Team, and it’s a lot of work for a small group: designing the questions, running and promoting the survey, processing the responses, and building the report you see today. If you’d like next year’s survey to be bigger, better, and published sooner, the most direct way to make that happen is to join in.

You don’t need to be a marketer. The work spans the whole survey lifecycle:

  • Organizing: question design, methodology, and planning the timeline
  • Running: promoting the survey and keeping momentum while it’s open
  • Processing: the Python data pipeline, the Astro/ECharts site, and writing up the results

Every bit of help counts, and the people who make the biggest difference are the ones who stay involved from the first question draft to the published report. If that could be you, reply in this thread, or say hello in the Marketing Team Matrix room.

And of course, questions and ideas about the results themselves are welcome below too.

– The NixOS Marketing Team

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Nix Community Survey 2025
Discussion of flakes, from 2025 NixOS Community Survey Report
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3 posts were split to a new topic: Discussion of flakes, from 2025 NixOS Community Survey Report

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This is really great stuff…and it also sheds light on a lot of the issues we’ve observed in the community. Like, you can sort of make out the different stakeholders and what the frictional points are going to be.

Great work marketing team!

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Really interesting to see the breakdown of target triples people use. It’s not surprising that x86_64-linux is the main one but the interesting part is that Arm Linux and macOS are 33%. The macOS part isn’t that surprising since Apple kinda forces people to use certain generations of hardware. The more interesting part is that aarch64-linux is at 17.4%. I wonder what this will be like next year, maybe we’ll see more people go to Arm.

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Love a spirited discussion but this is getting off topic for this thread. @moderators can we move the flake discussion to its own thread?

sigh

You cannot mention group @moderators.

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I don’t precisely remember if this question “How have you installed Nix on any of your systems?” had any context, but if it didn’t have, then I certainly answered “through NixOS” and thus “Most respondents (78.4%) first met Nix through a NixOS installation.” is an incorrect interpretation: I started using Nix (a few months) before using NixOS, but now and for the last ten years, my way of installing Nix is through NixOS…

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