Escape Your Fate
Nyx rides tonight, and in her hand she holds a thread of fate. It is hers now, not the Moirai's. You don't have to bargain with the hand of fate for control of your own computer: with Nix, every package, every service, every line of your system is a thread you hold, inspect, and re-spin at will.
DEF CON 34's theme is Agency: self-determination, making choices that increase your own agency and helping others control theirs. That has been the Nix project's work for two decades. In a world of forced updates, dark patterns, and feeds tuned by someone else's incentives, NixOS lets you run your world instead: a single line of configuration enables stable, self-hosted replacements for services as varied as Google Photos or Slack, deployed repeatably across as many machines as you want. Starve the beast; it was never feeding you anyway.
And agency doesn't stop at your own machines; it counts double when you hand it to someone else. Build your software with Nix and it runs the same way on any Linux distribution, over and over, with reproducible builds you can verify rather than trust. Spin up a development shell so friends and coworkers get the exact same environment you have. Package the thing you rolled yourself and contribute it back to nixpkgs, where upwards of 140,000 packages are maintained in the open by people who decided their software should answer to its users.
Agency over every package, service, and machine you run: that's Nix. Escape your fate at Nix Vegas.
CFP
CFP is open until July 15, 2026. Submit your ideas on Pretalx.
We challenge you to submit talks that answer to our take on the DEF CON theme, Escape Your Fate:
- Starve the beast: How can you use Nix and NixOS to reclaim your digital agency?
- Feed your community: How can we support others doing the same by rolling our own tools and build infrastructure?
- Resources, time, and energy: How can we use Nix to connect ordinary users with the developers who made all the software they depend on?
Note that we have two types of CFP this year: a standard call for presentations and a call for projects.
Don't like speaking? No problem. We have some space for people to show off their projects instead of giving presentations. If you have a cool Nix related thing you want to demo at con, we have the space (and, perhaps, the infrastructure) for you. Our NOC will connect with you beforehand to see how we can tie your project in.
Sponsors
Thank you to these companies who believe in Nix as the future of software deployment for supporting the Nix Community at DEF CON:
Closure Tier
Interested in sponsoring us with hardware, funding, or something else? See the Sponsorship Prospectus and connect with us at sponsor@nix.vegas.
Note that all emails to us go to a shared mailbox and ticketing system now.