NixOS Packages From Unstable alongside Stable (Google Chrome)

gistfile1.md

If you'd like to keep up-to-date with Chrome from unstable but otherwise want to run a stable NixOS release you can do the following:

• Create a file /etc/nixos/unstable.nix:

{ config, pkgs, ...}:
let
  baseconfig = { allowUnfree = true; };
  unstable = import <nixos-unstable> { config = baseconfig; };
in {
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    unstable.google-chrome
  ];
}

• Modify /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

  imports =
    [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
      ./hardware-configuration.nix
      ./unstable.nix
    ];

• Subscribe root to unstable:

sudo nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
sudo nix-channel --update

• Ensure you have done everything correctly and then rebuild and switch:

sudo nixos-rebuild dry-build
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade

Log out and back in again

Gotchas

I had installed Chrome imperatively, which is used in preference. See if you have done this via:

nix-env -q
# remove with nix-env --uninstall

A question, does hardware acceleration work for you? What is the output of chrome://gpu ?