More than 450 Nixers made their way to Switzerland to attend NixCon 2025 from Friday, 5 September to Sunday, 7 September this year. Traditionally, NixCon is organised in a different European country every year. The 2025 edition was co-organised by the OST took place at its Rapperswil-Jona campus.
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It was created by Eelco Dolstra and developed as the subject of his PhD thesis The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model, published 2006. Today, a world-wide developer community contributes to Nix and the ecosystem that has grown around it.
There have never been more attendees at a NixCon in its 10-year history. Enthusiasts travelled to Rapperswil from 45 different countries for the event. Thanks to the funding from 24 sponsors, free tickets could be given out to people who have contributed to the open source Nix repositories. Local hotels offered special deals for event attendees.
On Friday and Saturday, speakers gave talks in two lecture halls in parallel all day. In addition, workshops were hosted in two classrooms and hacking spaces were available throughout the weekend. In total, over 60 scheduled events took place to cover a broad range of topics: official community updates, panel discussions, hardware, cybersecurity, networking, lightning talks, and even a mobile game that helped people engage with each other. Sunday featured no official programme, but hacking spaces and coffee were still available for everyone. With their NixCon ticket, attendees were able to enjoy lunch and dinner at the venue at no extra cost on all three days. They also received conference shirts, tote bags, and custom-made Swiss chocolate. Thousands of stickers and espressos were handed out and Saturday's sunny lakeside barbecue was a big success.
All recorded talks are freely available on the NixCon channel on YouTube and CCC. The German technology magazine Heise.de included an article by Jacek Galowicz on the event, and Michael Stapelberg published a good overview of the event on his blog.
The next NixCon will take place in 2026 - keep an eye on the NixCon website for updates. A smaller Nix hackathon at the campus is already planned for 15 November and 16 November.