Covid stopped a lot of activities including IT events. As things are hopefully coming to normal the Czech community of Fedora had its first booth at a physical event since 2019. It was also a revival for OpenAlt, traditional open source conference in Brno, because its last edition was in 2019, too. The traditional date of OpenAlt is the first weekend in November, but to avoid any possible autumn covid waves the organizers decided to have it on Sep 17-18.

The conference grew to occupy pretty much the whole venue (Faculty of Informatics of Brno Technical University) and offer 6+ tracks. This year it shrank back to its pre-2012 times.

For us from the Fedora community it was great to be back among people, talking directly to our users. We demoed the freshly released Fedora 37 Beta and we also showcased Fedora on a Pinephone (with the Posh environment). The theme of this year’s OpenAlt turned out to be Linux on mobile phones. There were several talks on this topic, people showed up with different phones (Pinephone, Librem 5…) and different OSes on them (Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, SailfishOS…).

During the last 3 years we have also accumulated a lot of Fedora swag in the storage, so we had a lot to give away and people appreciated it because apparently getting a sticker of your favorite distribution is something people were missing too.

I’d also like to thank Vojtech Trefny, Jan Beran, Ondrej Michal, and Lukas Kotek for helping me staff the booth.