My FOSDEM'25 watchlist

Thanks to my new job (thanks !) I could attend FOSDEM 2025 last January. It was my first time and a great experience! Like everybody, I could not attend all talks I wanted to. Maybe you could not either, so here is my watchlist. Follow links blow to access videos, slides or links to official projects.

My favorites were about browsers

How browsers REALLY load Web pages. That's something everyone should know, right ? A talk full of simple but interesting experiments. We're still far from cross-browser compatibility.

My second favorite mixes retro-computing and degrowth: Resurrecting the minimalistic Dillo web browser. That radical approach highlights modern web's errors and also provide refreshing ideas.

For your general Linux knowledge

Lennart Poettering took one hour to reflect on 14 Years of systemd. Room was packed full of 1500 people, although he was too far from his mic. No surprises but learned a few details by the way. Note the wink to Rust in the end.

Speaking of Rust, earlier in this room Sylvestre Ledru presented the uutils project that basically aims to rewrite essential packages in Rust. He also pointed to a profiler, samply, and a benchmarking tool, hyperfine, that are both waiting in my toolbox for something to optimize. Soon.

I still have a bad feeling with Docker containers, so was curious about Podman quadlets. They aim to bridge the gap between local containers composition and Kubernetes (Kube... quad... you get it ?). see also https://podman-desktop.io/blog/podman-quadlet.

FOSS and project governance

The Growing Body of Proprietary Infrastructure for FOSS Development: Repeating Bad History was a nice keynote but quite long. They told us the best quote:

GitHub is Free. Free as in free cocaïne.

On those matters I suggest you instead keep an eye on Forgejo, spawn your instance like Codeberg's, and maybe one day they'll be able to interoperate. That was the idea behind the 8-minutes Show and Tell: Federation at Forgejo. Yes, is idea is to bring ActivityPub to software forges.

Open Source Governance for Software Engineers gave more practical advices on the topic.

For multimedia/radio fellows

I had the pleasure to meet Liquidsoap's maintainers, Romain and Samuel, along Romain's talk "Toward a unified abstract content API". Hopefully our discussions will materialize in presentations in an upcoming Liquidshop 🤞

During the PipeWire state of the union I learned that PipeWire is also about webcams.

Cutest FOSDEM moment happened while an OBS maintainer explained how to write an MP4 Muxer for Fun and Profit (spoiler: the fun part is exaggerated). 2 days after his release, someone on the mailing-list explained they did the same thing in parallel at Apple... That person was in the room!

Apparently the recording of FFglitch got lost and that's too bad because it was the video that you really need to see. Check out their instagram.

I learned about reproducibility

Influenced by new coworkers, I discovered the reproducible builds world through 2 pretty cool talks.

First, a tale of several distros joining forces for a common goal: reproducible builds shows that it's also a security issue (supply chains 👀), so big distros have already done much work on reproducibility. Apparently reproducible Haskell is the hardest part.

I expected Python was not great either, but thanks to some advanced sorting it seems OK, as exposed in rewriting pyc files for fun and reproducibility. Where I learned by the way what's in those .pyc files.

Advanced Rust I'll have to watch again

I'll be working first-hand on the graph presented by Sebastiano Vigna in Huge graph analysis on your own server with WebGraph in Rust because it's the fastest way we have to explore the Software Heritage archive. If you're curious about advanced typing in Rust, have a look.

Also, many stickers and a lack of sleep

So no great conclusion, but I'll be happy to have your recommendations via Mastodon !