Ubuntu Summit 2024

Last weekend I was able to attend my first Ubuntu Summit in Den Haag, Netherlands! I was kindly invited to represent the Late Night Linux family of podcasts as one of the hosts of the Hybrid Cloud Show. I was very excited as this means I could finally get to meet one of my co-hosts in person! Canonical paid for my flight and hotel and I was off to meet old friends as well as new ones. This was my first time really participating with the Ubuntu community and it was not quite what I expected.

Canonical has been talking about going public for a while now, at least since 2018 according to my memory. I was positive that as time marches on and we get closer to this seemingly inevitable conclusion that their developer conference would share the same tones. However that was not my experience at all. There were no sponsored talks by partners, the schedule was tight and focused on interesting and innovative subjects, and many of the booths were for the various communities around Ubuntu rather than just companies looking to make a sale.

The booths actually were my favorite activity because it was just time to sit and talk about the various things going on in the community: Linux gaming (!), making better documentation not just for Ubuntu but for all, developing with upstream, and the intricacies of Object Oriented Programming in Rust – just to name a few. To be clear, there were a few companies out there selling things like System76 and Framework but that wasn't the whole reason they were there. System76 was giving us a sneak peek of their latest alpha for Cosmic and discussing the complexity of making a desktop environment (almost) from scratch.

My favorite thing I saw was how a company called DeepComputing wanted to make a RISC-V developer kit. This isn't as straightforward as many people might think. Qualcomm found out the hard way with its Windows ARM developer kit. Instead of trying to eat a whole elephant they partnered with Framework to make a mainboard that fit their 13-inch model. Framework laptops are famous for their easily repairable and swappable components. Thanks to Framework's ethos for open sourcing everything, including its hardware specs, it was a perfect match. Now any developer can start trying to develop for RISC-V by just swapping out a piece that the Framework CEO showed us takes under 5 minutes to do.

While all that was impressive to me, what really blew me was the people I met. Everyone was extraordinary. No, really, I mean it. Every single person I interacted with outside getting coffee, at the booths, or during the talks was sincerely excited to be there and wanted to share their perspective on things. The Ubuntu community has some very intelligent people, not just the Canonical employees, and they're all working towards making things better for everyone. A very sincere "Thank You" to the whole community for being very welcoming and open to all my questions about the past, present, and future of Ubuntu.