9 Feb 2026

FOSDEM 2026

I haven’t posted about FOSDEM for a while, but I have attended FOSDEM in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2026.

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developer’s European Meeting) is one of the biggest open-source-related conferences with more than a thousand talks and height thousands of attendees. And it’s free (as in “free beer”).

Talks

As said, there are a lot of talks, more than 30 tracks in parallel. It’s not possible to see everything, it’s like a music festival but 10 times worse. Just for the talks I was interested in, most of the time there were three in parallel.

Bad news: quite often when arriving in front of a conference room, the room was already full.

Good news: the vast majority of talks are recorded, so you can watch them.

This year there were a lot of talks about sovereignty… I don’t know, that has always been one of the main points of Free Software, empower people. Given the audience, I’m not sure that was very necessary, that's a message for enterprises and governments.

And at last a technological event that was not full of AI stuff.

Subjects were quite varied as usual, from how the EU Cyber Resilience Act impacts Free Software to post-quantum cryptography.

From what I have seen, the main subjects I want to have a deeper look at now are:

Stands

In the corridors next to the conference rooms are the stands.

Turris was there again. In 2018 they had a stack of Omnia routers hacked to play tetris with the LEDs. This year they had the Omnia NG which includes a screen. So of course they ran Doom on it. Ultimately, the screen will be used to display general information but also to restore a previous snapshot in case of configuration going wrong.

The T/2 team was showing Linux running on old hardware, like a Sun SPARCstation or a Power Mac G5. I tried T/2 on my AlphaStation without success (apparently it’s related to the Linux kernel dropping support of older Alpha processors), but I haven’t tried it on my iMac G5.

Otherwise, there were the usual big ones: Debian, Fedora, KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, FSFE… As well as a lot of smaller projects.

And of course, you have to be blind to miss the VideoLAN stand…