Last week was the 2021 edition of Nest with Fedora. Nest is the all virtual version of Flock, the annual Fedora community conference. While sad we couldn’t all get together in person again this year, the virtual version was fine. The platform again used was ‘hopin’ and it did a reasonable job overall. I did have some problems sharing my presentation for my talk, but otherwise I think everything went smoothly. A few of the talks I went to and some thoughts on them:
- State of Fedora keynote: Nothing earth shattering here, but good that things all seem to be going up and to the right. 🙂
- Fedora Council Town Hall: Some good questions, next time it might be good to go round robin as I think there were a few council members that didn’t talk and some that talked a lot.
- Meet CPE: Good overview of how we do things and whats going on from my teammates.
- 6 tips working with communties: I think these were all things I knew, but I think it was a good talk for those that don’t know or haven’t thought about how open source communities work.
- My Pinephone talk: I had technical problems to start with, but after that it went smoothly enough. I was worried that I would have too much time to fill, but I just had enough with some questions. (More on this talk below)
- Exploring our bugs: Lots of interesting charts and graphs. I am still not 100% sure what they might mean. I wish Fedora had a data analysts SIG or something that tried to ask questions and answer them with data. You could spend a LOT of time in this. 🙂
- CentOS and Alma: Nice talk about how things were going in both projects and how they collaborate.
- fbrnch a year on: I knew about fbrnch, but I haven’t used it. This talk made me put playing with it on my list for sure. Lots of things it can do for you/simplify workflows.
- But it’s all ‘upstream’, why doesn’t it work on fedora? great talk from Peter about different levels of upstream and how you need to integrate things in fedora, not just assume they will all work together when updated.
- Hassle-free Throw-away VM’s with Testcloud: I missed the start of this talk, so I really want to watch the recording later and get the basic info. I was a bit lost lacking that info. 🙂
- Fedora Trivia Pub Quiz: Fun as always. I never win.
- Fedora Project Leaders of Legend and Lore: This was _AWESOME_ to see (almost all) the ex-fpl’s in one screen and answering questions. I had to leave about 1/2 way through this talk, so I am looking forward to the recording to watch the rest of the fun.
- Giving and Receiving Feedback: This was a great talk, I hadn’t really though about feedback from all the angles, and changing the dynamics so you are on the same side trying to reach a goal is brilliant. I hope to use this and to see if we can make it pervasive in out communities. Also ended up reading thought a bunch of related blog posts and twitter threads… great stuff!
- Building Initrd Images from RPMs: A plan to make initramfs from rpms instead of using dracut. I’m ok with this plan.
- Making Your Life Easier with the Packager Dashboard: The packager dashboard is great, I hope this gets more folks using it. I have been using it myself for a while and it’s really quite nice for package maintainance.
- Cross Collaboration Panel: This was interesting, but might have been more interesting from a ‘each person tell your collaboration story’ instead of just trying to answer questions from the audience. Still, cross distro collaboration is a great thing and we should all strive to do it when we can.
- Closing Remarks: Most signups and attendees ever. It seems clear even if we do in person next year, we should either _also_ do a virtual conference or some kind of hybrid. It’s just too handy to not have to travel. 🙂
My talk on the pinephone seemed to go well, but it’s hard to tell. 🙂 I tried to put forth the idea that because smart phones are slowing down (people want longer support, don’t replace their phones every year anymore, no new superfeatures, % sales lower year over year) this is a great time to move a open source community into the phone space. It’s very similar to the pc market in a lot of ways. I went over the pinephone hardware (will never be super fast, but at ~150$ it’s reachable to hack on from everyone) and hopefully someday may be a daily driver for some. We really need upstreaming of some connectivity so we can start making fedora images: wifi/bt/modem/usb-c, etc. Hopefully that will happen soon. Userspace is coming along fast with Phosh/plasma/other desktops and applications.
Overall a nice time, many thanks to all the organizers again this year!