NixOS 25.05 Community Highlights

Development
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While many of us have read the announcement and release notes, including the new ones for nixpkgs, I had an idea for this release to supplement the long, somewhat intimidating nature of these changelogs.

NixOS 25.05 Community Highlights

What’s one thing you contributed to 25.05 that you’d like to point out?

This is your chance to show off things added to NixOS 25.05 that may not even be in the release notes. What feature, tool, module, package, or API did you add that others should know about?

Links (newest first)

I contributed the modules for vwifi and Kismet, including a NixOS test that checks that wireless monitor mode works between stations and access points, and did a Planet Nix talk on it. I wrote documentation for how to test things that are usually hardware-only, using Wi-Fi as an example (if anyone else has examples that are similar to add to the manual, please do).

(After a lobsters comment where someone forgot to add things to the changelog, which I suspect is rather common, I think this is now even a better idea).

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A few I’d like to point out are:

  1. meta.teams being a thing, it allows us to distinguish packages owned by a specific team and being able to look that up inside of Nix itself. It even works with search in a way that allows people to see exactly every package a single team owns.
  2. The beginning of splitting pkgs* into pkgs/top-level/variants.nix. This is a development happening into 25.11 that will allow for better cross compiling inside nixpkgs without increasing evaluation.
  3. LLVM nearly fully refactored, we’ve optimized the derivations in there so things are more modern. Soon enough, this will lead us into being able to fully override LLVM.
  4. LLVM 12 is nearly removed, everything which could be bumped off 12 has been. Only thing left is GHC which I’m estimating will come by 25.11. We will continue bumping things so older LLVM versions are removed.
  5. Several dozen packages have been fixed by myself and others to support utilizing the pure LLVM stdenv. This allows for better support of multiple toolchains in nixpkgs.
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The ISOs shipped on the download page and in nixos/release.nix now include specialisations that can be selected in the boot menu. The minimal ISO contains a specialisation that boots the latest kernel instead of the LTS kernel. The Plasma and GNOME ISOs have been combined into a single graphical ISO that offers both as specialisations, as well as latest kernel specialisations of each.

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