electron: Please bump Electron to v33+ for continued Nixpkgs packaging (+ native Wayland)

[v3rm1n0]

Describe your feature

Hi! I'm the Nixpkgs maintainer for stoat-desktop together with @RossSmyth.

Context — Nixpkgs Electron 38 removal (source-built)

A nixpkgs issue was opened today tracking the planned removal of the source-built electron_38 package, with the binary variant additionally being marked as insecure, in approximately 7 days. Several apps are affected, and stoat-desktop is one of them.

Once that change lands, building stoat-desktop from Nixpkgs will be broken for any user.

Request

Would it be possible to bump the Electron dependency to a version that is still actively maintained and packaged in Nixpkgs — ideally Electron 33 or newer (the current stable series)? This would unblock the Nixpkgs package before the 7-day deadline.

Bonus: Native Wayland support (related to #182)

This also connects to issue #182, which requests native Wayland support. Electron 20+ ships with Ozone/Wayland support behind the --ozone-platform=wayland flag, and from Electron 28 onwards it can be enabled by default. Bumping Electron would therefore address two concerns at once:

1. Keeping the Nixpkgs package buildable and secure
2. Enabling the native Wayland path requested in Update to latest Electron version (Native Wayland not enabled by default) #182

Note

• The Nixpkgs stoat-desktop package currently pins electron_38; once upstream ships a release on a supported Electron version I can update the pin on my end immediately.
• If there are any breaking API changes between Electron 38 and the target version that need work, I'm happy to help test a pre-release build on NixOS/Wayland.

Thanks for maintaining stoat-desktop! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help move this forward.

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EDIT: One note specific to Nix packaging: stoat-desktop includes update-electron-app as a runtime dependency, which handles automatic Electron updates for most end users. However, this mechanism is bypassed entirely in the Nixpkgs package, the build wraps the system-provided electron binary and ignores the auto-updater. This means the version pinned in package.json is what actually determines which Electron Nix users run, making the bump necessary even though other distribution channels self-heal automatically.

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— @v3rm1n0 and @RossSmyth (Nixpkgs maintainers for stoat-desktop)

[Dadadah]

Upgrading to Electron 39 is not as simple as it seems. I have done it in my fork but the pointer is messed up and there were a few other issues. I can maybe see about fixing the issues and opening a PR in a few days but it may be a while before it's mergable.

[v3rm1n0]

Thanks for looking into this so quickly! Completely understand that it’s not an easy change.
On my end, I’ll see what I can do to buy some time, worst case the package gets marked broken temporarily until the PR is mergeable, which is not the end of the world, as it is overrideable.
Let me know if there’s anything I can help with on the testing side, especially on NixOS/Wayland. Happy to be a rubber duck for any of the issues you’re running into too if that’s useful

[v3rm1n0]

@Dadadah so i was able to get the build running without a problem with the version bumped to electron 40.6.1 ill keep testing