FOSDEM 2026
I didn't attend FOSDEM in Brussels this year. I doubt I will ever go back willingly. Most likely my visit last year will be my only visit. See that post for details. I have friends who visit FOSDEM and I cherish these friends. I would very much like to keep seeing them, but perhaps somewhere else?
TL;DR of the last post: I'm spoiled by the Chaos events. FOSDEM, in comparison, suffers from bad arrangement, bad venue, bad network, being held during height of the flu season, and terrible audio/video and recording. Everyone would win if there were more volunteers and perhaps a cooperation with the excellent c3voc and their streaming platform media.ccc.de.
I'm not even sure I fit in with some of the fossbros, the 90's style nerds, and the increasing corporate presence. Not my crowd, really? It's likely a cultural thing. But there are a few good talks!
As usual, it was an immense con, with 1079 events in 71 tracks!
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/
Had a quick look at the usual suspects, the devrooms for Security, RISC-V, and Go this year… But, nah, not even that interesting.
I did watch some talks. Recordings are not necessarily available yet.
I found the devroom "Building Europe’s Public Digital Infrastructure" interesting, but not very technical.
Some highlights:
- Good enough file system a crash-proof, copy-on-write filesystem based on Bε-trees for Plan 9, already available in 9front and with an ongoing effort to port it to OpenBSD. This might be huge for OpenBSD if upstreamed, since they still suffer with the old FFS, now even without soft updates.
- Audio and music production Plan 9. Started watching this, but then sound stopped working for a while on this and the next talk, but I changed to the next talk, which was sent almost simultaneously.
- Matrix: State of the union. Introduced epochs against dating attacks, faster joining of large rooms, and other projects. I'm still skeptical about Matrix (see for instance Eden's and mrus' criticism), but it seems to be picked up by a lot of agencies across Europe, including in Sweden. They will also host the next Matrix conference in Malmö, Sweden, my home town!
Engineering XMPP Federation: Building Messaging, Voice & Social Features Across Independent Projects. The talk began before time! I missed the beginning.
A lot about interesting XMPP projects, including the compliance suites for new software, distributed trusted Multi-user chats and the Multiparty Jingle (muji) signalling for video conferencing, and possibly the future XMPP over QUIC.
XMPP certainly still has it's problem, not least the MUCs, which are an ugly hack at best, but I'm glad development continues.
The author of the River Wayland compositor, Isaac Freund, spoke about separating the Wayland compositor and the window manager. River has always had the layout generator as a seperate process. When I started using River, perhaps 3-4 years ago, I wrote my layout generator by copying the example code and adding the missing Monocle mode:
https://codeberg.org/mchack/mctile
Now, Isaac has expanded this into doing most of what a traditional X11 window manager would do, including doing server-side decorations. He says it won't affect performance much.
I still haven't experimented with it myself and I'm not sure what I think about it. It would make it much easier to write a window manager for Wayland, so you can get the exact behaviour you want much easier than before, but what other things comes with it? I don't know.
- Hans "Pengo" Hübner was supposed to do a talk about IBM 3270 terminals, but it disappeared from the schedule! Perhaps he called in sick? But why not just add a note to the schedule? Why remove it?
Watched two talks about the La direction interministérielle du numérique (DINUM) and their digital cooperation suite La Suite Numerique, (code) which they develop in close cooperation with the German Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität der Öffentlichen Verwaltung (ZenDiS) (openDesk project) and a Dutch counterpart (didn't catch the name).
The first talk was LaSuite.coop: A Public–Cooperative Model for Digital Commons, which is about an interesting way to support the use of La Suite in other places than government.
Then I watched Scaling national open-source products across Europe: lessons learned from two years of cross-border state collaboration which was mostly about the cooperation between France, Germany and The Netherlands about developing La Suite, but also hackathons with people from a lot more countries. Most interesting. I really wish Sweden's Myndigheten för digital förvaltning would pick this up!
If you didn't know about it, the Europan Commision, EU's "government", has their own Open Source Observatory:
https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor
Written by MC on Pungenday, the 38 day of Chaos in the YOLD 3192 ().