NixOS 25.05 upgrade / Gnome issues - a few apps not starting - system monitor/tweaks

Hi,

I have upgraded from 24.11 to 25.05, and a few apps don’t seem to start correctly now, such as GNOME System Monitor and Tweaks. I get the border/background, see the image.

I also built a LiveCD in this environment and these apps seem to start ok intermittently (worked once and failed once).

My configuration.nix is here. Could not upload via Chrome; the Discourse upload pop-up does not appear fully, I only get a white box.

Live CD config is here

I’m relatively new to Nix, so I’m likely making some basic mistakes.

Thank you in advance for any tips or ideas.

Cheers
Chris

Try starting one of those apps via a terminal and looking for printed errors.

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Please move this to the Help category.

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Thanks - this is what I see on a working 24.11 run of system monitor:

(gnome-system-monitor:6469): Gdk-WARNING **: 12:20:38.970: Vulkan: ../src/amd/vulkan/radv_physical_device.c:1984: Device '/dev/dri/renderD128' is not using the AMDGPU kernel driver: Invalid argument (VK_ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER)

And on the failing one (different machine):

MESA-INTEL: warning: Haswell Vulkan support is incomplete
MESA-INTEL: warning: ../src/intel/vulkan_hasvk/anv_formats.c:752: FINISHME: support YUV colorspace with DRM format modifiers
MESA-INTEL: warning: ../src/intel/vulkan_hasvk/anv_formats.c:783: FINISHME: support more multi-planar formats with DRM modifiers

Perhaps that is relevant?

A failing run would be the one with possibly interesting output.

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Ah, sorry. You provided both. Now you have some warnings to look up the meaning of.

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Yeah, it all happened since 2 days ago. Both stable and unstable. Anything strictly GTK/GNOME is not rendering correctly.

On a sidenote, I have soft lockups for N seconds since a week or two since any version past 6.15-rc4 made it to nixpkgs. Anything with an AMD gpu would freeze.

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This is the last good nixpkgs rev that I’m aware of: 96ec055edbe5ee227f28cdbc3f1ddf1df5965102

Date is 2025/05/31. Pretty new imo

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Ok, I found this thread referencing a similar issue.

The fix mentioned is to force the use of OpenGL, like so:
export GSK_RENDERER=opengl

That gets the monitor and tweaks apps working for me.

However, that seems like a temporary fix to me, and the issue needs to be addressed elsewhere (but where - in GTK or by making the GNOME nixpkg do this?)

Do you have a stateVersion option set in your NixOS config? What’s its value?

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I believe I have the same problem on one of my old laptops. Upgraded to 25.05 when it was released. Did a nix flake update today and some gnome apps are blank (system monitor, tweaks, console, nautilus…). GSK_RENDERER=opengl fixes the problem. I have a second old laptop (same flake) that doesn’t have this problem. stateVersion is 23.11. The MESA-INTEL warnings are present on both laptops (even after applying the fix). Anything else I can look into to provide more info?

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It’s also happens to me on a ryzen 7 5800H. I’m pretty sure Vulkan is actually complete on that igpu

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system.stateVersion = “24.05”

Getting this too. Also affects the file manager for me. My system.stateVersion is 24.11

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