Last Friday I organized a Fedora 40 release party in Prague. A month ago I got a message from Karel Ziegler of Etnetera Core if we could do a Fedora release party in Prague again. Etnetera Core is a mid-sized company that does custom software development and uses Red Hat technologies. They have a really cool office in Prague which we used as a venue for release parties several times in pre-covid times.

We got a bit unlucky with the date this time. It was really terrible weather in Prague on Friday. It was pouring outside. Moreover the Ice Hockey World Championship is taking place in Prague now and the Czech team played against Austria at the time of the release party. These two things contributed to the less than expected attendance. But in the end roughly 15 people showed up.

The talk part was really interesting. In the end it took almost 4 hours because there was a lot of discussion. The first talk was mine, traditionally on Fedora Workstation that switched to a long discussion about Distrobox vs Toolbx. As a result of that Luboš Kocman of SUSE got interested in Ptyxis saying that it’s something they may actually adopt, too.

The second talk was delivered by Lukáš Kotek who talked about building a retro-gaming machine based on Fedora and Atomic Pi. Several people asked us to provide his slides online, so here they are:

The third talk was delivered by Karel Ziegler who spoke on the new release of his favorite desktop environment – Plasma 6. The last talk was supposed to be delivered by Ondřej Kolín, but at the beginning of the party we were not sure if he’d make it because he was travelling from Berlin and was stuck in Friday traffic. The first three talks took so long due to interesting discussions that Ondřej arrived just on time for his talk.

He spoke about his experience building a simple app and distributing it on Flathub. This again started an interesting discussion about new and traditional models of Linux app distribution.

In the middle of the party we were joined by Andre Klapper, a long-time GNOME contributor living in Prague, and Keywan Tonekaboni, a German open source journalist who is currently on his holidays travelling on trains around the Czech Republic. We found out that we were taking the same train to Brno next day, so on Saturday we had another two hours for Linux software topics. 🙂

I’d like to thank the Fedora Project for sponsoring my travel to Prague to organize the event and also big thanks to Etnetera Core for providing just perfect venue for the party and sponsoring refreshment (They even had a beer tap!) and the party cake.