Bitwig-studio segfaults on recent nixos or home-manager flakes (25.05 & 24.11)

Hi everyone!
After seeing that 25.05 was out, I tried upgrading my flakes for nixos and home manger configs to the latest versions, but the upgrade caused bitwig-studio to crash on launch for me.

Bitwig’s crash log indicated that it crashed in native graphics code, so I initially thought it had something to do with my nvidia drivers (I’m on RTX3080), but changing driver versions didn’t fix the problem. Furthermore, the same crash also happens on my other machine with only intel integrated GPU using the same config. So I think it’s not the graphic driver’s fault.

To summarize all the combinations I’ve tried so far:

  • Installing bitwig-studio via home manager crashes on both 24.11 and 25.05
  • Installing it via nixos config makes it crash on 25.05, but on nixos 24.11 it doesn’t crash. This is the only configuration that works for me.
  • Using a different version of bitwig studio doesn’t effect outcome. (Tried 5.2.5, 5.3.5, 5.3.8)
  • Changing nvidia driver versions doesn’t effect outcome. (I tried 565 and 570)
  • Using nvidia gpu or intel integrated graphics doesn’t effect outcome.
  • Setting hardware.graphics.enable to true or false doesn’t effect outcome.
  • Changing linux kernel version to be the same as last known working flake commit doesn’t effect outcome. (6.12.25)

I’m out of ideas on where to look into next.
Any help would be appreciated!


Crash log excerpt on nvidia rtx 3080:

#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007f34d9b79b23, pid=126998, tid=127349
#
# JRE version: OpenJDK Runtime Environment (21.0.6+7) (build 21.0.6+7-Ubuntu-122.04.1)
# Java VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (21.0.6+7-Ubuntu-122.04.1, mixed mode, tiered, compressed class ptrs, z gc, linux-amd64)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [libnvidia-glcore.so.570.144+0xd79b23]
#
# Core dump will be written. Default location: Core dumps may be processed with "/nix/store/gsman0cwlms2l679bla5vgmf21jc5lvl-systemd/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump %P %u %g %s %t %c %h" (or dumping to /home/jaoreir/core.126998)

on my intel integrated gpu laptop:

#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007f869d383315, pid=1905, tid=2444
#
# JRE version: OpenJDK Runtime Environment (21.0.6+7) (build 21.0.6+7-Ubuntu-122.04.1)
# Java VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (21.0.6+7-Ubuntu-122.04.1, mixed mode, tiered, compressed class ptrs, z gc, linux-amd64)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [libvulkan_intel.so+0x383315]  wsi_CreateXcbSurfaceKHR+0x15
#
# Core dump will be written. Default location: Core dumps may be processed with "/nix/store/gsman0cwlms2l679bla5vgmf21jc5lvl-systemd/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump %P %u %g %s %t %c %h" (or dumping to /home/jaoreir/core.1905)
#

Can you please open an issue on the repository so we can track and follow the progress on Github? (check if a similar issue exist before creating it)

I made an issue here: bitwig-studio: segfaults on launch · Issue #410805 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

Turns out it’s bitwig studio’s issue with vulkan that causes the crash. They will have a fix on their next version release.

For now there’s a workaround to use opengl as the graphics backend instead: echo skia-gl > ~/.BitwigStudio/graphics-backend