How do I update Pipewire to the latest version?

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Hello,

Can someone please help?

How do I update Pipewire to the latest version?

Thank you!

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Welcome to nixos.
I guess as it is your first post that you don’t use flake to manage your configuration.
Pipewire should have the version 1.4.9.
If you search for pipewire on search.nixos.org

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you can see the current version if you are on version 25.11
if you select unstable you can see that version 1.6.3 is already supported on the unstable branch.

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There are multiple solutions on how you can get the newest version.
For you the simplest solution would be to change to the unstable channel.

  1. sudo nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-unstable nixos
  2. sudo nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
    This would change your whole setup to the unstable branch.

You can wait until 2026-05-25 07:00 at which point the unstable channel becomes stable and you can add the stable channel like this:

  1. sudo nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-26.05 nixos
  2. sudo nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade

What i would do:
Try to learn more about nixos and flakes here: Nixos & Flakes Book

And than use flakes to only use the unstable channel for pipewire.
At the moment i use this setup for ollama as the new gemma models don’t work on the version that is currently on nixos 25.11 but on the unstable branch it is more up to date and it works.

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Thank you very much for the clear and detailed answer!!!

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For PCs I recommend running off of nixpkgs-unstable.

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Yeah that’s bad advice. Stick to nixos-unstable if you must use unstable.

But in general you don’t need flakes at all. nix-channel or even npins will suffice without having to fundamentally change the way nix evaluates code.

This has nothing to do with flakes. You’d have to set services.pipewire.package to the pipewire package from unstable, and hope it plays nicely (it probably will, but always a caveat with mixing channels).

My question would be, why do you think you need to be on the latest pipewire?

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For the record, if you’re using channels you would do that by:

  1. Adding the unstable channel to your system:
    sudo nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-unstable nixos-unstable
  2. Install the package from there somewhere in configuration.nix (or another module):
    # configuration.nix
{
  pkgs,
  lib,
  pkgs-unstable ? import <nixos-unstable> { },
  ...
}: {
  services.pipewire.package = pkgs-unstable.pipewire;
}

There are ways to do this more cleanly if you use unstable a lot, but that’s not what this thread is about. In either case, contrary to popular belief, you can import nix code dependencies without flakes.

But I concur with @waffle8946 here:

The fact that you want to do this at all points to an XY problem. A user should almost never care about the specific pipewire version they’re using.

The “correct” solution should be waiting ~3 weeks for the next NixOS release.

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