Python tkinter not available on linux

[toshinari123]

as usual when working with nix i just spent an hour trying to enable tkinter in python311 by overriding it with { x11Support = true; <other deps...> } and after reading source carefully turns out (if i understand correctly) x11Support only does something if its an Apple darwin system???

why is this the case? google says tkinter supports linux

should i open an issue on nixpkgs?

P.S. python311full was building too long
P.S. this is also the case in 25.05 (link above is 24.05)

[waffle8946]

tldr use python3Full if on stable and python3Packages.tkinter if on unstable.

Breaking changes announcement for unstable

The full flavor of the Python 3 interpreter is going away. The two features it provided were support for Bluetooth sockets and X11. Bluetooth sockets (socket.AF_BLUETOOTH) will be supported in the default python3 package. The X11 support was used to build tkinter. For nixpkgs this module is not built-in, but instead available from the package set (python3Packages.tkinter). This is a meaningful reduction in the closure size for python3, which is why it was only available in python3Full and i…

[tejing]

I don’t believe it only does something on darwin. This part:

pkgs/development/interpreters/python/cpython/default.nix

Should change the build environment in a way that’s (or at least may be) automatically picked up by the build system.

[toshinari123]

thx guys for quick response, no override and pythonpackages.tkinter worked

also yea ur probably right on buildinput affecting the build