NixOS 82: Upgrade a NixOS Service (Pipewire) To Unstable Using Flakes

[@ChrisMcDonough]

I forgot to run pipewire --version after the nixos-rebuild to show that the rebuild had an effect. It is 1.0.4.

[@needMoreInput]

❕nvd, what a wonderful addition❕- never thought to diff my build output-

[@itssoaztek4592]

Awesome content. I am looking forward to the point in time where I can start learning and using NixOS. Thank you!

[@ChrisMcDonough]

Thanks!

[@TresSeaver]

Heh, thanks for digging into it. As it turns out, NixOs 23.11 already has the "watershed" version of pipewire needed to support the "pro-audio" usecases. The case I saw was on Debian bookworm, which (because Gnome, d'oh) pulled in pipewire too early, and then (because Debian) locked it down for their most recent stable release to a pre-watershed version (0.38.something). My escape hatch on the system where I was dabbling with PW was to update from `bookworm` (current Debian stable) to `trixie` (Debian testing). Prior to that, I had tried enabling the `trixie` apt repos, but got boggled at the size of the update: no way was I going to accept the amount of unrelated damage (likely a similar number of new package versions as you showed) just to get PW running. Therefore, your example does validate the argument that NixOS (with flakes) makes such cases simpler. Also, technically, pipewire emulates PulseAudio and JACK, which are the "multiplexing" audio servers. ALSA, which provides the lower level hardware support, is used by all three of them (ALSA is basically the kernel interface to audio).

[@ChrisMcDonough]

Had fun making the case, thanks for watching. And thanks about ALSA, I wasn't sure whether Pipewire just reimplemented it and that part of Pipewire was in the kernel.