Time flies when you’re swamped. The Ubuntu Summit 2022 was months ago already. Jon has written about it. Heather has written about it. Me, I got COVID there (in Prague, not necessarily at the conference) and won’t write about that, but do want to be enthusiastic about it. Better very late than never.

Note that I don’t have photo’s to show. Look at Jon and Heather’s posts for lots of good shots.

Best Part

There was a knitting class. “Kinetic Knitting”, to fit with Ubuntu’s naming theme, and this month’s Kudu release I guess. I though this was a great addition to the programme, for the fairly simple reason that it was a totally different kind of activity. I don’t know if I can still remember all of it – practice makes perfect and I have not practiced since – but I did produce a kind-of-lumpy purple-body orange-wings butterfly.

Best Part

Meeting some of my online friends – people like Simon Quigley of Lubuntu with whom I’ve worked for years around Calamares, but never met before. And now we have, and drank beer together (or was it wine? it was certainly later in the evening). So there was a bit of talk about Calamares development and how it’s slowed down in community mode. More on that another time.

Meeting up with people from Akademy – Mauro, Luca, Aleix, Harald, Jon, Pedro – was keen as well, although it did drive home that between events I get very little KDE coding done.

Best Part

Prague can serve decent vegetarian food, although looking at the menus of Czech restaurants did not inspire confidence. But I now know that Indian (was that the Kashmiri place?) and Chinese is just fine. I also ended up at the Scout Academy for coffee and lunch, which was inexpensive and “studentikoos” (a useful Dutch word that can mean, among other things, “inexpensive and unpretentious”).

Best Part

Just after I had done my “There’s a Framework for That” song (to the tune of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”), the A/V tech came in and started the recording, so all y’alls missed out on that.

Takeaway

Canonical (and Ubuntu) is doing a lot of technically interesting stuff. Lots of Flutter, lots of WSL .. which is technically interesting but doesn’t exactly set my heart on fire. I’d like to thank them for sponsoring and organizing the conference, regardless.

Calamares has a bunch of fans, which is great to see in person. It doesn’t translate into any additional work being done on the project, but it’s good to know there’s a community.

Seeing people in real life has real value, and it was good to catch up also with the LAS crowd and some KDE friends.