home-manager/docs/release-notes/rl-2505.md

Release 25.05

This is the current unstable branch and the information in this section is therefore not final.

Highlights

This release has the following notable changes:

• The option now defaults to true, meaning that services will automatically be restarted as needed when activating a configuration.

  Further, the "legacy" alternative has been removed and will now result in an evaluation error if used.

  The "suggest" alternative will remain for a while longer but may also be deprecated for removal in the future.

• The Home Manager test suite has been removed from the main Nix Flake since it caused unnecessary evaluations and downloads. Instead the tests are available through a Nix Flake file inside the tests directory. See for example commands.

• The Home Manager NixOS module now supports home-manager.users entries that do not have corresponding users.users.<name> entries, making it easier to provide Home Manager configurations for users managed through external identity management systems. To take advantage of this, such users must have their and attributes set to high-precedence values with lib.mkForce or similar, overriding the defaults that pull from, respectively, users.users.<name>.name and users.users.<name>.home.

• The Home Manager NixOS module option home-manager.useUserPackages now sets the default value of the newly-introduced per-user option, making it possible to define a policy on the use of users.users.<name>.packages for package installation, and to override that policy on a user-specific basis.

State Version Changes

The state version in this release includes the changes below. These changes are only active if the home.stateVersion option is set to "25.05" or later.

• No changes.