Home Assistant ships a warning that your install "will not work after 2026.11." DuckStation detects NixOS four different ways and fatally errors your build on purpose. A maintainer won't merge the one-line word-wrap fix you've needed for a year. On most platforms your options are comply or quit. On Nix, everything between you and the source is negotiable.

This talk is a guided tour up the override ladder, from module options and mkForce to overrideAttrs, fetchpatch-ing unmerged PRs, overlays, and finally patching nixpkgs itself. The stories along the way are real and primary-sourced: sabotaged npm packages, the xz backdoor, the youtube-dl DMCA takedown, rug-pull relicensing, and the nixpkgs patch literally named nixos-was-never-supported.patch.