As we move into 2025, we wanted to reflect on the crowning event of the year: the Ubuntu Summit. Just over two months ago, we celebrated Ubuntu’s 20th birthday in The Hague, the Netherlands. We’re still buzzing from the electric atmosphere you all brought to this event, as we came together to showcase what open source excellence should look like.
As we reached an important milestone, we set ourselves an ambitious goal for the summit. We wanted it to be an event which celebrated all of the experts, builders, engineers and tinkerers who are challenging the status quo and doing exciting, amazing things in open source. We were delighted that so many of you answered the call and helped transform our vision into a reality.
We’ve put together this blog to celebrate the moments that shaped the summit and made it such an inspiring, memorable 3 days. We hope we can convey the energy and excitement that the event brought to all of us in attendance.
Speaking Highlights
A conference is made by its speakers. Our guiding principle for every Summit is to bring together the very best thinkers from the open source community. We’re committed to elevating the voices of those who are challenging the status quo and shaping the future of technology and the world. Our cohort of incredible presenters this year represented a number of industries, communities and domains of expertise. You can watch the entire Ubuntu Summit Talks 2024 Playlist on the Ubuntu YouTube channel.
Day 1
Mark Shuttleworth kicked off the conference with his opening remarks. He talked about the history of Ubuntu, from the days when the project was called “nonameyet.com”. Mark spoke about the choice to use the word “Ubuntu” and the philosophy behind it: “I am what I am because who we all are.” Reflecting on the sheer amount of change that Ubuntu has powered over the past 20 years made Mark’s remarks about the future even more poignant. He shared his ambitions for the future of Ubuntu and how he believes the next 20 years will be transformative and lead to innovations that today’s users can only dream of.
Before we could recover from the inspiring talk delivered by Mark, Rakhi Sharma gave us a peek into the rapidly evolving Servo project. Delivering a brand new, parallel, memory safe and cross platform web rendering engine is an incredibly ambitious goal. But the good folks at Igalia are driving this forward at a blazing fast pace.
Following Rahki was a blockbuster talk from David Morin. David is the executive director of the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). This year, we discovered the story of how the motion pictures industry uses, develops, and contributes to open source software. And we have to thank David for showcasing this during his informative, and very entertaining talk. Next time you watch a movie, keep an eye on the credits – you might spot an open source project or two!
Following the afternoon break, Georg Link and Luis Cañas-Díaz introduced us to GrimoireLab, a tool that can be used to monitor open source supply chains and measure the health of entire communities. It is important to reflect on the fact that when we use open source, we need to be responsible and ensure that the components we use are supported.
Closing the day, Matthew Hodgson took us to the journey of making Matrix Mainstream. Matrix is an open network for secure, decentralized communication. One of the key features of Matrix is that chat servers can federate with other servers, meaning that users can reach many communities, no matter which federated server they used to create their account. Element X, the new Matrix client, is an incredible step up from its predecessor. It speeds up client load time with a sliding sync proxy, it integrates modern authentication methods, embeds voice and video calls, and overall improves on all paper cuts the community has been giving feedback on. Tools like Matrix allow our communities to enjoy the benefits of modern communication tools, while keeping true to open source values like transparency.
Day 2
Eric Holk, the first speaker of the day, spoke about the Rust programming language, its journey and community governance structure and gave us a glimpse into its future.
Immediately after Eric Holk’s presentation, Carl Richell and Victoria Brekenfeld gave us a practical example of how Rust can enable developers to create projects that push the boundaries of technology. Carl announced the Alpha availability of Cosmic Desktop, an exciting upcoming project aimed at revolutionizing the Linux desktop by making it easily customizable, empowering users to create the environment that empowers them to work best. Cosmic Desktop was written from scratch, using the Rust programming language. It includes features like auto tiling and it is extremely customizable. During the presentation, Carl showed a couple of examples of how easily a user or distribution maintainer can tailor and tweak the Cosmic Desktop to their needs or preferences. From what we saw, it has a bright future ahead, and we cannot wait to see how it shapes up.
Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz took the stage and spoke about Penpot’s tech pivot. Penpot is an open source, self-hostable, web-based online design prototyping tool with a large and growing user base. It aims at bringing developers and designers together in a single real time collaborative environment. Pablo took us through the decisions, the priorities, and the challenges of a large and ambitious project like Penpot. And in line with the theme of the day, Pablo announced that Penpot will be using Rust for Webassembly development. Penpot’s mission to close the gap between developers and designers is an inspiring one, and Pablo’s enthusiasm is infectious. We can’t wait to hear more about Penpot, and we will definitely stay tuned for more exciting developments.
Closing day two the Ubuntu way, we had a round of exciting lightning talks. Lightning talks are fast paced, 5-minutes talks without breaks between them. We believe they are the perfect way to end a day of long form talks. We weren’t disappointed! Within 25 minutes, we had amazing speakers on stage showing amazing engineering feats of: Thunderbird, Heroic, Open Design, Ubuntu Flavors Design Squad, and Framework.
Speaking of Lightning talks, Nirav Patel, the CEO of Framework, surprised us all. He was audacious enough to show us that you can change the architecture of your Framework 13 laptop from AMD64 to RISC-V in less than five minutes! What a treat, this was truly jaw dropping and extremely entertaining. Well done Nirav, Framework, and DeepComputing – thank you!
Day 3
Day 3 started with a bang. Gordan Markus, Yuning Liang, and Nirav Patel took the stage for the first talk of the day: Unstoppable Force Behind Linux on RISC-V. And what a talk it was! The trailblazing trio from Canonical, DeepComputing, and Framework delivered a high-energy, informative, and extremely entertaining session. They ran through how they’re collaborating to bring Ubuntu to more RISC-V devices, in order to help ensure that RISC-V succeeds as an open standard in mass-produced consumer electronics. They managed to show us that excellent engineering between organizations can be done in the open! We understood that it is extremely challenging, a feat not for the faint of heart, but there are a few brave and ambitious people driving innovation.
The last (but by no means least!) day of the Ubuntu Summit showcased a wide array of talks and workshops. Cordell Bloor presented ROCm for AMD GPUs on Ubuntu. Cordell is a member of the Debian ROCm team, and the Debian maintainer for the ROCm packages. ROCm provides the tools to program AMD GPUs from low level runtimes, all the way up to end user applications. It is quite popular in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and High Performance Computing. He explained what ROCm is, what it is used for, and how its architecture works. He went into hardware compatibility details, to bring more light on what users can expect from their AMD GPUs. As GPU based workloads become more and more critical for businesses, we’re looking forward to seeing how ROCm drives open source innovation.
Mark Jackels from DreamWorks animation studios took the last long form talk of the Ubuntu Summit 2024. We were delighted to welcome DreamWorks back after making their Ubuntu Summit debut in 2023. Mark really opened our minds to the massive success of open source software. Mark talked about how DreamWorks is Harnessing HTCondor, usually reserved for High Throughput Computing, to orchestrate massive workloads for feature films. We highly recommend watching the video on YouTube. Mark spoke with great passion and he mesmerized the audience with his deeply technical session. We could really see how excited and invested the good folks of DreamWorks are about their work, and about open source software.
The Ubuntu Summit could not end without a last round of lightning talks. We had another barrage of fast paced, intense and fun lightning talks to stimulate our brains to close the day: Event Check-in Kiosks, Regolith Desktop, Valley, OpenVINO, Ubuntu Credentialing, Open Source 3D printing, and Open Source DJing.
Engaging Workshops
We want the Ubuntu Summit to be a place where we all learn valuable skills. This year, we brought together incredibly talented speakers from all corners of the world of open source to host workshops. Our speakers imparted knowledge across a broad range of topics, and really reminded us how vast the impact of open source is in our world. We kicked off with 2 fascinating talks from Freehive about running a design agency using only open source components. We also learned how to write Matrix bots from Grégory Schiano Lomoriello and Nils Büchner from the Ubuntu Matrix council, followed by the Snapcrafters who taught us how to create snap packages, and later showed us how we can automate snap builds and tests with GitHub actions. Juanmi Taboada brought a remotely operated submarine to the Ubuntu Summit, where he guided us through the process of building the hardware and configuring the software. And if this sounds familiar to you, it is because we had an aquatic treasure hunt using Juanmi’s submarines last year at the Ubuntu Summit 2023 in Riga. These are only a few of the many challenging, fun, and stimulating workshops of Ubuntu Summit 2024. Videos have been edited and uploaded to the Ubuntu On Air YouTube channel in the Ubuntu Summit Workshops 2024 playlist.
Booths & Hallway Track
A new addition to this year’s Summit was the introduction of Community Booths. While booths are commonplace at technology conferences, we wanted to ensure these booths would be in line with the community focus of the event. From robotics to Linux gaming, from Silicon vendors to sustainability initiatives, and everything in between, we are happy to say that the hallway track experience was once again a success. How do we know? Because it was consistently bustling with activity, as community members got to know each other’s projects. It is both inspiring and humbling to see so many passionate and talented individuals come together, exchange ideas, find common goals and form new collaborations. As the picture below shows, the orange side of Linux stimulates the brain and lifts your spirit at the same time. It is not uncommon for us to see friends mimicking one of the Ubuntu mascots, and others photo-bombing colleagues and friends.
Hackerspace
Another new addition to the Ubuntu Summit was the Hackerspace event. This took place in the evening of day two, and it was a gathering of people interested in specific topics: Security, Linux Gaming, Juju/HPC/AI, Documentation, Community. Each group had a dedicated room, and spent a few hours brainstorming ideas, hacking at issues, and getting important feedback from the participants. Day two was definitely exhausting, but we all felt a great sense of accomplishment as we walked out of the venue that day.
Interviews
At the Ubuntu Summit, we like to keep interviews genuine and fun. We had the privilege of engaging with a brilliant cohort of open source mavericks, and we could clearly see the drive and passion behind everything they do. Interviews are being edited and will be published at a later date on the Ubuntu YouTube channels. Until then, keep an eye out for them on the Ubuntu YouTube channel.
CLOSING PARTY!
The Ubuntu Summit closing party was the perfect way to wrap up a weekend of intense talks, brain-melting workshops, mind-bending lightning talks, booth and hallway track interactions. Parties like this bring everyone together, and give us a perfect memory of a particular point in time. And this time around, we believe it will be very hard to forget a closing party taken at the Grote Kerk in Den Haag. In fact, we are deeply sorry for those who missed the party!
Linux DJing
After his awesome lightning talk about DJing with Linux, Jesus Soto proved it can be done, with a live performance. And what a performance! 🎶
That Linux DJ Jesus really had some mad skills, It looks like he managed to get everyone jumping on the dance floor and showing their best moves!
Minotaur Attack!
Despite being deprecated by now, the Minotaur refuses to be defeated! Reports tell the story that the Mantic Minotaur escaped its labyrinth prison again and was found having a blast at the Grote Kerk, performing ancient dance moves and posing for the partygoers’s entertainment.
Photo booth shenanigans
The photo booth is always a fun attraction of the Ubuntu Summit closing party. As the picture below shows, many friends were spotted having the time of their lives trying silly hats at the photo booth!
Ubuntu Summit 2024 YouTube Playlists
All the recorded talks and workshops are now live on YouTube, and organized in two playlists: Ubuntu Summit Talks 2024 and Ubuntu Summit Workshops 2024. The Ubuntu Summit 2024 Highlights video and Framework’s Lightning talk are also published as standalone videos.
Amazing photos
What is an event without good memories? Fear not, because this year the Ubuntu Community has done something incredible. We would like to thank all the Ubuntu Community contributors who submitted amazing photos for our Ubuntu Summit 2024 Community photo album. There were definitely some fun ones in there as well!
We would also like to give a shout out to Ali Parpaei and Holland Park Media (HPM). Keeping up with the orange side of Linux is a feat in itself. Despite that, the good people of HPM have done fantastic work with videos and photos throughout the weekend. You can find a curated photo gallery on the Ubuntu Summit 2024 Official Photos. If you want to dig deep and look at all the official photos, you can find the complete set of official photos in the Ubuntu Summit 2024 Official HiRes Album.
What’s next?
We love the Ubuntu Summit! It is a great privilege to organize an event for the Linux community. It is inspiring to see great minds tackling complex topics, pushing forward for a better future, and doing so in a friendly, fun and welcoming way. We hope you had a great time attending the Ubuntu Summit 2024. If you could not join in person, we hope that we managed to peek your interest for next year. If you want to keep updated about the next Ubuntu Summit, keep your eyes on the Ubuntu Blog.
Finally, remember that the Ubuntu community is fun and welcoming all year long! Ubuntu is an incredible project that welcomes all types of contributions. From design to code, from documentation to advocacy, the Ubuntu Community has a place for you! If you want to join this wonderful project, we encourage you to check the Ubuntu community page.
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