State of the Nix union and funding realities

After experiencing Planet Nix and SCaLE, we come back convinced the next phase of Linux is already taking shape.

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
• Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• SCaLE 23x — SCALE is North America's largest community-run open source conference.
• Jupiter Broadcasting's SCaLE Matrix room
• SCaLE 23x - YouTube — SCaLE 23x live streams, talks, and more.
• LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
• Flox.dev
• Flox: Developer environments you can take with you - GitHub — Flox is a virtual environment and package manager all in one. With Flox you create environments that layer and replace dependencies just where it matters, making them portable across the full software lifecycle.
• Keynote: Privacy’s Defender - Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years | SCALE
• Cindy Cohn | SCALE
• noblepayne/nix-anywhere-else-talk — A Slidev presentation about the "dark arts" of ELF surgery and Nix, built entirely with Nix. This talk explores how patchelf and a deep understanding of the Executable and Linkable Format can make binaries portable in both directions: bringing foreign tools into NixOS, and taking Nix-built artifacts out to the rest of the world.
• DeepComputing — Advancing the adoption and implementation of RISC-V
• Roxane Fischer - Anyshift.io
• Determinate is the future of Nix today: Wasm, provenance, and flake schemas
• EFF Privacy’s Defender - Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years | SCALE
• Cindy Cohn - SCaLE — Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation - Defending your rights in the digital world
• llama.cpp: LLM inference in C/C++
• mangowm - Mango Wayland Compositor — Practical and powerful wayland compositor (dwm but wayland)
• The Open Source AI Definition 1.0 - Open Source Initiative
• Pick: sone — Native TIDAL desktop client for Linux. Modern UI, custom themes, and bit-perfect lossless audio up to 24-bit/192kHz via exclusive ALSA. License: GPL-3
• Pick: qmd — mini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes, whatever. Tracking current sota approaches while being all local. License: MIT
• Pick: mtr — Combines the functionality of 'traceroute' and 'ping' in a single network diagnostic tool. License: GPL-2
• MTR - Welcome Home Brent