Six months after the previous 25.05 “Warbler” release, the new stable version, NixOS 25.05 “Xantusia,” is officially here. Targeted at advanced users and developers, NixOS bets on an immutable design and an atomic update model, emphasizing reproducibility and reliability with the Nix package manager.
Nixpkgs adds 7,002 new packages and updates 25,252 existing entries. A cleanup effort removed 6,338 outdated packages to keep the repository manageable and secure. On the NixOS side, the release introduces 107 new modules, adds 1,778 configuration options, and removes older, unused components.
The desktop stack is updated to GNOME 49. This version ends X11 session availability, includes a new video player and document viewer, and ships a redesigned calendar application. Other applications across the GNOME suite receive updates as part of the regular upstream cycle.
I tried installing it for fun and my /home/$user folder is empty. Is that normal? Like there’s no Desktop, Downloads, Documents, etc folders by default. I picked the GNOME desktop environment at install. Never seen that before.
This is normal. XDG dirs must be configured manually. Alternatively, home-manager has options for this.
Good to know! I’ve not seen any other distribution handle home folders that way. I’ve even installed previous versions of NixOS and don’t remember ever needing to do that. Seems like an odd choice to me, but NixOS has a few of those so it’s all good. Definitely not a beginner distro.
Probably not. There must be something missing in your configuration. Do you have
createHome = truefor your user?When facing issues on nixos, you can easily just share your
/etc/nixos/configuration.nix+ a description of your error + logs and it’ll provide useful context for people. We’ll even be able to spin up a VM with your config to see if the bug can be recreated.I have a home folder. It’s just empty. To answer your question though, no
createHome = trueis not in my configuration.nix file. I could dump all that, but this is a fresh system. It’s clearly an issue with the NixOS installer. I tried it on completely different hardware just now and have the same problem. I solved it by running this series of commands.xdg-user-dirs-update
gio set ~/Desktop metadata::custom-icon-name user-desktop
gio set ~/Documents metadata::custom-icon-name folder-documents
gio set ~/Downloads metadata::custom-icon-name folder-download
gio set ~/Music metadata::custom-icon-name folder-music
gio set ~/Pictures metadata::custom-icon-name folder-pictures
gio set ~/Videos metadata::custom-icon-name folder-videos
gio set ~/Templates metadata::custom-icon-name folder-templates
gio set ~/Public metadata::custom-icon-name folder-publicshare
xdg-user-dirs-gtk-update
I guess it’s fine, but not ideal. I could see that confusing the shit out of a more casual user.
When you say “nixos installer”, do you mean the GUI nixos installer? If you have a github account, you can create a bug report. As a KDE user, this has never been a problem for me.
Yep, this one: https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-25.11/latest-nixos-graphical-x86_64-linux.iso. I don’t have a GitHub account, but someone else said it’s normal. So who knows!