Solved: Having trouble getting Blender 4.5.3 on 25.05

Help
1

Hello. I don’t want to overexplain. I’m trying to get Blender 4.5.3 running on my systems running 25.05. Switching to unstable is not an option, I have already tried to follow the 2nd protocol outlined here but it downloads Blender 2.9 which is obviously not what I want.

I know we are around the corner from the next release, but I simply cannot wait that long, I have been trying for several days to get 4.5.3 running to no avail. :frowning:

Because of changes to the binary format in latest blender versions, I can’t work on anything that has been saved by my mac workstation which is a big problem, please help me!

PS I don’t use flakes and would prefer a solution that neatly integrates into configuration.nix if that’s helpful.

2

You used

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

let
  unstableTarball =
    fetchTarball
      https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-unstable.tar.gz;
in
{
  #...

  nixpkgs.config = {
    packageOverrides = pkgs: {
      unstable = import unstableTarball {
        config = config.nixpkgs.config;
      };
    };
  };

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    #...
    unstable.blender
  ];
}

And you got blender 2? I don’t think so…

(Now packageOverrides are deprecated, you’d be better just pinning the tarball you want and not even messing with packageOverrides/overlays. And mixing channels always has some risks. But this should, at worst, simply crash when you try to run blender, not give a random old version.)

3

I promise you the output of blender --version is 2.90.0. I don’t know what I did wrong…

4

If you installed anything with nix-env or some third-party methods, uninstall it.

If you still get blender 2, post the output of the following commands:

sudo nix-channel --list
nix-channel --list
type -a blender
5

Hello, thanks for your help. Here is the relevant output:

nixos https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-25.05
➜  ~ nix-channel --list                                
➜  ~ type -a blender    
blender is /run/current-system/sw/bin/blender
➜  ~
6

Looks fine.

Please share your config that you wrote, then.

8

I’m going to consider trying this, although I have never heard of pinning a specific tarball before. Is that the specific Blender build desired? How would I figure out which one I wanted and how would I specify that in the nix configuration? Thanks for your help so far, I’ve been trying a few things to no avail.

edit: solution here as outlined

I’m currently trying something, this reddit post showed a procedure, and getting the revision for the nix package came from this website I found. Is there anything more official? Either way, it’s currently rebuilding, fingers crossed this time.

PS This is my first time trying this and I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I replaced the package name with this entire text snippet and it appears to be building something:

         # Descriptive name to make the store path easier to identify
         name = "my-blender";
         url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/";
         ref = "refs/heads/nixpkgs-unstable";
         rev = "c12c63cd6c5eb34c7b4c3076c6a99e00fcab86ec";
     }) {inherit system;}).blender
9

Hello, I’m not sure if I should make a new thread on this or not:

This bulid does not have CUDA support. I know how to make nixOS do that with the default (e.g. pkgs.blender) provided version by nixpkgs, but I don’t know how to combine CUDA support with this specific version I’m pinning.

If anybody has any clue, that would be appreciated! Thanks!