I have used NixOS for quite some time now, but I just now started using home-manager. I made that choice because I wanted to try Hyprland again, but wanted to do it the ‘Nix’ way. Of course me being a NixOS beginner, it came with its plethora of problems.
Nixpkgs versions
Now that I am again smarter, I know that if you are using flakes for your system configuration, you can just choose the suitable home-manager release for the channel your system is on (home-manager gets all weird when you use a different release from your system). I installed home-manager from the nixpkgs repository using
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
# ...
home-manager
# ...
];
in my configuration.nix. However as this home-manager package was on some unstable 25.05 release on nixpkgs channel 24.11 (quite weird I know), I got all kinds of errors when running home-manager switch. Because I have had both 24.11 stable channel and unstable channel on my system for quite some time now, because I needed newer versions for some packages, I decided to bite the bullet and jump on the unstable channel for my whole system. I now know that I could’ve added
inputs.home-manager = "github:nix-community/home-manager/release-24.11";
to my system’s flake.nix and use the specific release for my nixpkgs channel, but that’s that.
Package versions
The second problem I ran into that really made me pull my hair out was newer Hyprland releases not being compatible with older nixpkgs channels. That was before I swapped my system over to the unstable channel. I tried to install a newer version of Hyprland in my home-manager flake. Although it installed fine, when I launched Hyprland, it immediately crashed with some Aquamarine errors (aquamarine being the new backend for Hyprland). I would’ve guessed that Nix would warn me about installing packages build for unstable on the stable versions of drivers, but no. It sounds so obvious now, but really make sure that your drivers are up to date for the packages you are trying to install.
What the …?
The next problem is completely unhinged. I am not going to dive into it, but I hope it helps you in some way. After updating to the unstable channel and reinitializing home-manager, I got completely unhinged errors from every single nix command I ran.
nix: symbol lookup error: nix: undefined symbol: _ZTv0_n88_N3nix22RawInstallablesCommand3runENS_3refINS_5StoreEEE
That is not okay, Nix. However I found the solution in GitHub and I am not really in the mood right now to find out what happened. I only needed to
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
It might’ve been set from some IntelliJ runtime configuration(?), but I’m not sure and don’t want to dive into it right now.
Nix, I love you, but you’re giving me gray hairs.