NixOS 26.05 arrived on May 30 with the codename Yarara. Release managers yayayayaka and jopejoe1 called it a point of pride. The project credits 2,842 contributors for 59,703 commits since the prior version. Those numbers reflect steady work across packages, modules and tests. But the real story sits in the infrastructure shifts. Stage 1, also known as the initrd, now defaults to systemd. The old scripted approach carries a deprecation notice. It disappears in the next release, 26.11. Administrators can still force the scripted version for now with a configuration flag. The change simplifies early boot handling. It aligns the initial ramdisk with the same init system that runs the rest of the distribution. Phoronix reported the switch directly from the announcement. Michael Larabel noted that the move replaces the former scripted implementation entirely in the default path. Discussions on forums suggest many users already experimented with the systemd initrd in unstable branches.…