This week, another edition of LinuxCon Europe took place in Dublin and as always Fedora was there. The Linux Foundation confirmed our booth quite late, just two weeks before the event, so we didn’t have a lot of time for preparation. On the other hand, we got the stand and three passes for free which was big help because the conference is otherwise very expensive (the standard pass was ~$1000). And I’d like to thank the Linux Foundation for the support.
Giannis and Jon at Fedora booth
Because we had little time for preparation, our booth was only basic: we had standard swag (Fedora logo stickers, Fedora product stickers, badges, case badges, pens), a stand-up banner, and a laptop showcasing Fedora Workstation 23. Unlike last year, the stand didn’t have the best location, but we still got a reasonable number of visitors. Here are some of my notes from the event:
One guy from Fujitsu Finland told us they were using Fedora on mission-critical servers and it turned out to be working fine. They’ve got the latest and greatest, they can adapt to changes earlier (he specifically mentioned systemd), and upgrading from one version of Fedora to another is much easier than to upgrade from one version of RHEL/CentOS to another.
A developer from Intel told us that their whole Linux development team was using Fedora. They also ran Fedora on their booth (another booth that ran Fedora was some UEFI organization). I was looking for someone from Intel who has something to do with the Intel video driver development because Retrace Server is full of false positives from the driver, but Intel was mostly represented by embedded Linux team.
Some developers asked what laptops we could recommend to run Fedora on because there is no compatibility database. I recommended ThinkPads because I think they still have the best Linux support and they’re still the most popular laptops among Linux developers.
Quite a few people asked us why we have two booths at the conference. That was because there was also a booth of Red Hat. A lot of people apparently think that Red Hat and Fedora Project are the same things. Having a separate booth sends a strong message that Fedora is not Red Hat-only thing and it’s, in fact, the most independent among the Red Hat-backed community projects.
Even at LinuxCon there are people who have no awareness of Fedora, so paciently kept explaining what Fedora is about and what has to offer. Building awareness in the enterprise ecosystem is IMHO one of the main benefits of being at LinuxCon.
It was a bit saddening to see so many Macbooks at LinuxCon. I saw more of them this year than any other year before. Even people from the Linux Foundation were promoting their Linux certifications from Macbooks with OS X.
Many visitors asked about the new Fedora products (Workstation, Server, Cloud). Evergreen question was why we have Fedora Server if there is already CentOS. A lot of people apparently associates Workstation with something for developers and serious work only and ask if we have something for end users. Yes, our core target audience are developers, but Fedora is still very much useful for other end users, too. Maybe we should say that more clearly and loundly in our marketing messaging.
Fedora running at Intel booth
At the end, I’d like to thank the Fedora Project for sponsoring my travel and lodging and Jon Archer and Giannis Konstantinidis for staffing the booth with me.