FOSDEM has come and gone for 2020, so it’s time to look back at another huge event (it was a birthday event, although I didn’t notice it that much). Like most years, I was non-stop busy with either the booth or talking to people, so no photographs.

Friday

Pre-FOSDEM, the FreeBSD community gets together for a Devsummit, and we talked about X11 and graphics and KDE and Wayland and .. well, that’s the stuff I was paying attention to, anyway.

I encountered some old friends and met some new ones, Lara (touch screen support) and Kamila (kernel bits) and Raichoo (wayland), and there was coffee and pastry as befits Brussels.

If there’s a main takeaway from this day for me, it’s that KDE on Wayland on FreeBSD is not close yet, but we’ll be working towards it for the next six months and coordinating with Gnome and the rest of the desktop stack to make that happen. Raichoo will be leading the Wayland bits. (Over two years ago I wrote a bit about Weston already!)

In the evening I defected and met up with Bhushan and the Plasma Mobile and UBPorts and PostmarketOS people for dinner. I don’t know mobile, so this was a learning experience.

Saturday

Um, I think I was at the booth. There were people. I was hoarse by the end of the day, and then GitLab went and bought us some beer and it turns out restaurants close in Brussels at ten and so fries happened.

Sunday

More booth time, but also “typical FOSDEM”: I went looking for Jonathan (not Riddell) and Jonathan came looking for me, and we must have passed each other several times but not actually spotted each other.

On the way, though, I met Phil from Manjaro and Erik from ArcoLinux, both of whom are “customers” of Calamares. Excellent customers who send good bug reports, even, and it was great to finally meet people that I work with every day. We went to talk to KiwiTCMS about Calamares testing and how to better handle the workload – and once we found Alex at the booth we had a really enlightening talk with him. We walked away with a much better idea of what we need to put together on that front.

So that fills me with more plans for Calamares as well.

Balusankar from GitLab, who also coordinates the Malayalam translation for Calamares, was there, while I didn’t get to meet him at conf.kde.in. So there’s more and more people who are people, and not just IRC nicknames to me.

Somewhere in between I gave a quick talk on the state of KDE on FreeBSD; more entertainment than serious info, I thought, but there were sharks in the audience and I appreciate that.

Monday

Train back home, laden with chocolate and goodies from Open Source friends, and with just one new T-shirt (the FreeBSD devsummit one; also thanks to Lara for pointing out teeturtle for deliciously cute shirts).