Meetup Summary - June 2026
Thank you to everyone who came on Saturday! I definitely had a great time and everyone else seemed to as well. We had a great turnout with some new faces and a person who was new to Nix!
Peck
The meetup started off with @nikitawootten once again demonstrating a cool tool he’s developed called Peck - Vimium-style mouseless navigation for Niri. And if you haven’t heard about Niri, it’s a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor which is apparently all the rage with Nixers who like to customize their config. So if you’re into hyperland or sway, check it out.
Hardware
After Nikita’s presentation we also discussed hardware since our group is quite fond of small computers and here are the ones that came up
- Sol Reader E-ink, e-reader, VR-style glasses
- Steam Machine Valve’s latest hackable mini computer
- Daylight Computer A computer with a unique screen that is similar to E-ink but refreshes much faster while still being usable in the daylight
- Minimal Phone - E-Ink phone with a physical keyboard
- Motorola Graphene Partnership - Motorola and GrapheneOS announce Graphene support for Motorola phones as well as a future dedicated GrapheneOS phone
Members were quite excited about the Steam Frame in particular since this will be the first open VR device capable of loading a third-party OS. Getting NixOS on this thing will be mine and a few other’s first task when we receive it 
We also discussed various E-Ink devices since I noticed - BYOK - a small bring-your-own-keyboard device designed for distraction free writing, being featured on a news website I frequent. This led into a discussion about being able to control the software on these small devices, and while the devices being usable offline is great, that still doesn’t mean users have complete control over all of the software on them.
Networking, Containers and Python operator overloading
Another one of our members, @mmazzanti, demonstrated a few of their very interesting projects that do some wild things under the hood to achieve some pretty impressive feats.
First up is their rootless podman persistent network, turnip. Now I don’t have the acumen to do this project justice but check it out!
Their other project called shish implements async shell commands for Python with operator-based piping. Here’s a snippet of the syntax from the README:
from shish import sh, fn, out, code, err, STDERR
# Pipelines: cat input.txt | grep error | wc -l
await (sh.cat("input.txt") | sh.grep("error") | sh.wc("-l"))
# Python functions as pipeline stages
@fn
async def upper(ctx):
async for line in ctx.stdin:
await ctx.stdout.write(line.upper())
return 0
await (sh.echo("hello") | upper | sh.cat())
# Redirect: > >> < << with optional (fd, target) for specific fds
await (sh.curl("http://example.com") > "page.html") # curl ... > page.html
await (sh.grep("error") < "input.txt") # grep error < input.txt
await (sh.grep("error") << "line1\nline2\n") # feed string to stdin
await (sh.make() > (STDERR, "err.log")) # make 2>err.log
# Capture output
stdout = await out(sh.ls("-la")) # stdout=$(ls -la)
stderr = await err(sh.make()) # capture stderr
exit_code = await code(sh.test("-f", "config.json")) # just the exit code
# Environment and working directory: % @
await ({"FOO": "bar"} % sh.echo("$FOO") @ "/tmp") # FOO=bar echo $FOO (in /tmp)
# Kwargs to flags, subcommands via attribute access
await sh.git.commit(message="fix bug", amend=True) # git commit --message 'fix bug' --amend
A nix-curious NixOS install
A new member arrived who while having installed NixOS a couple of times, never got it to quite stick. During our discussions they finally became convinced to give it another go and we spent the rest of the session helping them install NixOS to a virtual machine. This part of the meeting was also quite funny because many of the members had been on NixOS so long that we no longer remembered how to troubleshoot installation issues for other Linux distros. In this case there was a problem getting virt-manager to run but we eventually got it figured out 
Conclusion
I had a blast seeing everyone there and we hope to see more new faces next time along with the regulars who always make a point to come! We’re always looking to see cool projects, help introduce someone to Nix or just discuss the news and what’s happening in the Nix community.
) Gabriella439 discusses some of the drawbacks of the way Nix is implemented as it relates to overrides and how she would do it differently: