I was given the honor and privilege of attending the Ubuntu Summit in Riga, Latvia. This was made possible by my brother from another country, Mauro, who I have known now for 4 or 5 years. I’m not sure how long… actually. Some years back, he was was an incredible encouragement in my many things I do as CubicleNate and one of those e-friends I will randomly send my current silly project of the week to see what he thinks.
I don’t think he is sick of them yet… Hmmm… 🤔
Background
I was not sure what to expect at an Ubuntu Summit, since my Linux Life largely revolves around openSUSE and I only swim in the Ubuntu streams from time to time. Would I be a kind of outsider here? I do regularly use Ubuntu at some level, in fact, just recently on Linux Saloon we took Ubuntu Unity for a spin and not so long ago, Rhino Linux, an Ubuntu based rolling distribution. I am quite familiar with the Debian and Ubuntu land, it’s just not my main squeeze. I knew that I wouldn’t be shunned or anything, but I also knew that I wouldn’t know a lot of people. The other trick is, when you only know a few people at a massive event, not to overly smother those that you do know.
I have to work very hard not to be annoying and in retrospect, I think I did a somewhat lousy job of it.
The good folks at Canonical took care of all of my travel arrangements and hotel accommodations so there wasn’t any real work required on my part. Just show up to the airport on time. I also made it a point to only pack a carry on. I would be there for only four nights, so a single backpack that I can easily shove under the seat on the airplane was sufficient. I was concerned about my luggage getting lost because that is generally par for the course with my travels.
Wednesday – Travel To Latvia
I made the decision also to leave my personal phone at home and only bring my “work” phone with me. Using the web messaging feature that Google provides with Android, I would be able to send SMS from my phone through my computer or the phone that was accompanying me. I was able to set up an international plan on that phone though the Verizon service my employer provides.
I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to get through checking in and security. The flight from Chicago to Frankfort was a rather long eight hours but the in-flight entertainment was streamed to the chair in front of me. Really quite nice. I couldn’t help but wonder what was under the hood of that service. Plex or Emby? Even better, could it be Jellyfin? I didn’t ask but I did enjoy the mindless entertainment of a couple movies. First time I had seen “John Wick” and although I did somewhat enjoy them, the plot line was incredibly thin. It was the embodiment of “less plot, more action” with very little dialog by the main protagonist of the film played by Keanu Reeves having very little dialog. I think the best part of the first two movies that I saw was seeing a Commodore VIC-20 be a part of this underground, antiquated messaging nerve center. Although, it was running it what appeared to be 80-column mode which was not even close to accurate but I am going to let that go just because of the smile it brought to my face to see a VIC-20 on screen like that.
Thursday – Arriving in Europe
I arrived in Frankfort with about 10 minutes to catch my next flight to Riga, Latvia. Thankfully, that flight was delayed so I did make it with just a smidge of time to spare. Perhaps the most remarkable part of the Frankfort, Germany airport was that they had a sausage cart in the middle of the walkway. It looked quite delicious but there just wasn’t the time.
There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the 2 hour flight to Latvia. The chocolate snack from the Lufthansa flight was quite possibly the best in-flight snack I have had in recent time.
When I arrived at the Riga International Airport in Latvia, I was quite relieved to be done with the flying portion of the trip. Napping in an airplane, no matter the quality of neck pillow, is never comfortable and my neck was less than pleased about the travel. I checked my phone to discover that I had no data service. I could make a phone call but data was not happening. Thankfully, I expected that something like this could happen and I printed out all of the documents for my accommodations along with my flight information. This worked out great because I accepted a taxi service ride to the hotel for which I was told after the fact was charged more than twice what I should have been. Truthfully, I didn’t really care all that much. I hope the very friendly man that took advantage of me got a nice meal out of the deal and thanked me for being a bit of a sucker.
I arrived safe so I am not complaining. I got from the airport to the correct hotel in one piece and since I didn’t bring any Euro with me I was able to pay with a VISA and complete that leg of my journey. I announced on the Ubuntu Summit Riga Telegram group my arrival as I checked into the hotel where I determined I made some packing errors. I did quickly correct them, thanks to the wonderful staff at the Tallink Hotel that happened to have the power adapter, toothbrush and toothpaste that I sorely needed.
That evening, I finally met up with Michael Tunnell, whom I’ve worked with for years on the TuxDigital network and have only known in digital form. It was great finally getting to meet him. I had dinner with Michael and another podcaster legend, Noah from the Ask Noah Show that night. I felt very much like commoner amongst these giants in the Linux and open source world, but it was fantastic. The food at this Indian restaurant we ate at was fantastic and the conversation was engaging. Truly, a great first night in Riga, Latvia.
Friday – Summit Day 1
The festivities kicked off in the afternoon where Philipp Kewisch teed the whole thing off in a warm and lighthearted manner emphasizing the welcoming aspects of the Ubuntu community. which eventually lead into having Mark Shuttleworth give a great motivational presentation of why we are hear and the importance of open source.
Rather than have me blather about my thoughts on it, I would highly encourage you to listen to the real thing here.
I went to two talks on the first day. The first was presented by Randy Packer from DreamWorks, “From origins to open source: The journey of DreamWorks Animation’s production path tracer, MoonRay.” Randy Packer was such a fantastic presenter, and great to talk to in the hall as well. His full presentation can be seen here:
The backstory on MoonRay was absolutely thrilling to hear. How it came to be was something of a a fascinating tale and how it has revolutionized the rendering of movies for DreamWorks is phenomenal. This presentation is worth a watch, and rewatch and another rewatch.
Another talk that I had the privilege to watch was Stand alone Effects Pedal System based on embed Linux by Filipe Coelho. The way that open source has allowed those with a musical passion to create their art is nothing short of remarkable. I believe that this was targeted towards guitar players, at least initially, this has become a kind do-everything device for music creation in the realm of effects and creating that perfect sound for your music.
I couldn’t find the video on this particular talk but for the other talks that I missed, here are some of the other talks you can watch.
Following the talks there was a “Welcome Reception” or “Open Mixer” where food was provided to encourage attendees of the Summit to talk and network. Perhaps my favorite moment that evening was meeting two people I have admired for years. Martin Wimpress (Wimpy) and Alan Pope (Popey) from the Linux Matters Podcast and formerly of the Ubuntu Podcast. Two people that really inspired me to do more with Linux but specifically in my own way. These two will always be held in a special place, something of celebrity status to me.
I have been told that it is not a good idea to meet your heros because of how they disappoint. These two, absolutely, did not disappoint at all. If I had made the trip out to Latvia for just this one moment, it would have absolutely been worth it.
Saturday – Summit Day 2
The second day of the Summit had a full day of incredibly exciting talks. It was a challenge as to which talk to go to but the first one of the day was a “no brainer.” Daniel Schaefer from Framework presented on, “What It’s Like to Build an Open, Repairable Laptop.” Some of the highlights of the talk included the demonstration on stage by Daniel of him taking apart his laptop WHILE presenting. Amazingly, the machine did not even hiccup as he removed the keyboard and touchpad module called the Input Cover and reattached it. I can’t say I would have had the confidence to do that but he is a firmware programmer for Framework so I’m sure he is very, very well acquainted with what it is capable of handling.
I was able to get my hands on the Framework 16, hold it, take modules off of the top of it and although it is an engineering test unit, it was pretty phenomenal. I can see this as being a great machine for enterprise use. The full talk can be watched here:
There were many other great talks I sat through but it was really hard to decide which ones as they were all so fascinating. The talks I did go to were:
Linux Gaming beyond Steam: Building Native Support for GOG, Epic and more by Dennis Sädtler and Pawel. He talked a lot about the Heroic Games Launcher which I then installed at that time as a Flatpak.
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
The big point with this presentation is to talk about all the work that the wider Linux gaming community is doing to provide access to games from GOG, Epic, Amazon and more through Heroic. This is an alternative to the Epic Games Launcher and GOG Galaxy which is focused on privacy, using fewer resources, while supporting a range of tools such as Wine, Proton, Crossover, DXVK, and VKD3D.
I’m sure that I will dig into this further and provide more information on how well it runs in openSUSE since there is not even a mention of it on their website.
Michael Tunnell from the venerable TuxDigital gave a Marketing for Open Source: How, Where, & Why talk. Even though I have listened to Michael talk about marketing over and over again, this was also incredibly educational for me and the big takeaway for me was to market to where the people are, even if you are not necessarily a fan of that particular social media. In a way, it is the message, not the method that is important.
The next “fun” activity of the day was a Group Photo. I haven’t yet seen but I can show you what it looked like form my point of view.
Frank Karlitschek of Nextcloud made a presentation titled, “What the AI revolution means for Open Source, Open Tech and Open Societies” and it centered around “ethical AI.” for which how it is being implemented in Nextcloud is really quite compelling. This really enticed me to look into implementing Nextcloud again for my own personal use. The features around synthesizing emails using AI to boil down long threads into something actionable would save me a LOT of time.
Thomas Crider, known online as Glorious Eggroll gave a great talk that was technical but not so much that it was completely above my head, “How Steam Play/ Proton makes Gaming on Linux Awesome.”
I do want to note that Mr Glorious brought a fascinating device called a Lenovo Legion Go where he was working on perfecting some version of SteamOS for this device and from what I could tell, it was working very nicely.
Link to talk, “How Steam Play/ Proton makes Gaming on Linux Awesome”
Some other talks of great interest were “The RISC-V Revolution” by John Ronco (SiFive) where he painted a very rosey picture of the present and future of RISC-V. I still question how truly accessible it will be for my usage, such as will it be easy to run an operating system of your choice like x86 or will it be frustratingly fragmented like ARM? I hope more like x86 but we will see.
Link to talk, “The RISC-V Revolution”
Mathieu Comandon of the Lutris project, gave a talk on “Snapshot in time: leveraging Snap and Flatpak to preserve our software legacy” which is something that I have thought about and talked to my co-hosts on Linux Out Loud about, just not in such a technical manner. Mathieu talked about the technical aspects of leveraging Flatpak and Snaps to create application containers focused on software and game preservation. Super fascinating and his enthusiasm while presenting was undoubtedly contagious.
I certainly believe that Flatpak and Snap technology is going to be at least A technology to preserve a lot of our software heritage and I am excited to see where this goes.
AppImage anybody?
Back in the main hall, Arkadiusz Hiler from CodeWeavers gave a talk on his work there, “Proton – Up and Down The Stream.” I don’t know if he is the most consequential developer of Proton that we all use and enjoy that game on Linux, but I will give him the credit. He spoke of stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, gotta review notes and put it here.
Game Night
Although I didn’t participate much in the actual game play of the evening, this was a fun hangout of sorts with the various tech enthusiasts, Summit attendees that just wanted to play with technology. Martin Wimpress brought some interesting hand-held game consoless with him for which I failed to take pictures of, that were absolutely fantastic. I played a game he wrote called Antsy Alien Attack written for a “fictional” retro console called the Pico. This just might be my favorite top-down, vertically scrolling shoot ’em up I have played. Listening to Wimpy talk about the challenges of writing a game that fits in only 64K of RAM. Truly fascinating.
This game can be downloaded or played in the browser. It truly is well worth it if you like this genre and even if you don’t, it’s truly a fun game.
https://wimpress.itch.io/antsy-alien-attack-pico
Sunday – Summit Day 3
The beginning of the last day was just a bit sad because it meant I would have to soon say goodbye to the people for which I share so much in common in the passion for Linux, technology and open source.
The first talk I attended for the day was a panel discussion, “Skynet or Star Trek, what is the future of AI?” This was such a good discussion at so many levels. Frank from Nextcloud was part of this panel and was somewhere between realist and Negative Nancy on the outlook of AI. A representative from Microsoft (I shamefully cannot remember his name, let me know if you know) was on the other end of it and may have been on the receiving end of Franks disagreement more than once. The great part about this whole discussion was the fact that it was a discussion with varying opinions that had some threads of agreement but smattering of disagreements.
My view of all things AI is that it is a technology that is not new but has newly been implemented in various ways that have numerous unknowns. It may be good and it may be bad. Like any tech it can be used for good or bad and as long as we keep our culture healthy, Star Trek is more likely out future and that is what I want to believe the future will be.
In the same kind of excitement I have for Framework, Fairphone was there with a talk about Open Source for Sustainable and Long Lasting Phones. Luca Weiss gave a great talk about the goals of Fairphone, which, like Framework, are to be better custodians of the resources of this planet. Fairphone makes a repairable, more sustainable, phone that will absolutely be my next phone that I purchase for myself. Sure, it may not be an incredibly innovative design like what you see from Samsung and Moto with their folding designs, but this is a phone that is supported for many years. Super exciting to see this kind of work being done.
I have almost zero interest in Apple’s silicon, M1 and the like, but I am always interested in getting Linux on more hardware. As such, I attended an incredibly fascinating talk, “From Asahi Linux to Ubuntu: Running Linux on Apple Silicon” presented by Hecttor Martin. He was presenting remotely but it was quite fascinating the process this obviously, genius-level, developer and technology enthusiast used to get our favorite operating system on this bespoke hardware platform. It fills a need need for people and I am more than happy to see that this work is being done to make the collective computing lives better for everyone.
The last talk I attended for the summit was by Arkadiusz Hiler, “The Many APIs of Gaming on Proton.” This, like other Proton talks were well above my head but this was also quite fascinating. The big takeaway here was the vast complexity of the APIs involved in developing the intermediary between the game that is looking to run on the Windows operating system to get the correct inputs and outputs while running on Linux. Combine that with all the bits and pieces of the various “Anti-cheat” components and it is an absolute miracle that we are able to play games as well as we can in Linux. I am very grateful for the work of Mr Hiler, his employer, Codeweavers, and the continued work of Valve and the numerous volunteers out there that are able to make it all happen.
Another highlight of the Summit was assisting Michael Tunnell with his interview of Mark Shuttleworth. The interview was great, of course, but what was particularly exciting for me was that I was able to have a great conversation with Mr Shuttleworth about his work, the work Canonical has accomplished through Ubuntu with Desktop Linux. Although I do not use Ubuntu Unity as my desktop of choice, I recognize the way the inspiration from Unity advanced not only Linux Desktop but the desktop paradigm across all operating systems. It was also fascinating to observe what a genuinely good, kind, and thoughtful man he is. I am certainly grateful for the short time I was able to interact with him.
Closing Festivities
Despite my regular late night, Saturday, Linux Saloon show, I am not a night owl, especially if I have to be up early the next day. I violated those two personal guidelines and I am glad I did for the Ubuntu Summit closing festivities at a place called the Digital Art House. This place was a fantastic ensemble of architectural and technological craftsmanship This place has projectors everywhere so images can be presented, much like a digital art gallery.
It was here I said goodbye to the many e-friends turned IRL friends. I was permitted to take part in the many glorious snacks available.
Since I had to be up and out by 4am the next morning, I didn’t stay real late but this place was absolutely fascinating.
Monday – Flight Home
I was up at 3:30am to head out to the airport by 4am. I had the privileged of riding to the airport with Noah of the “Ask Noah” show. He was kind enough to share a cab with me but he didn’t actually let me pay my portion of the fair. We had great conversation on the way to the airport for which I was incredibly grateful. I said, “goodbye” to him as I proceeded down the path to my flight back to the States.
The flight home mostly uneventful. The flight out of Latvia was delayed which made for an incredibly short layover in Germany which put me into a position of having to run to get to my flight in time. In my haste, I didn’t see that they changed the gate so I had to run the opposite direction, back-tracking an incredibly significant distance. Thankfully, the flight from Germany to Chicago was also delayed so I did make the flight. Interestingly, two guys that I sat between on my flight from Chicago to Germany were also on this flight headed back to Chicago too. What are the chances?
On the flight back, I was able to finish the last two “John Wick” movies. They were both much like the first two. Lots of action, not much plot. I don’t regret watching them, but I can’t say that I would take the time to watch it again. The best parts were the glimpses of vintage tech, really. I’m sure I can find a compilation on the internet somewhere.
When I arrived back to Chicago, I made the decision to take mass transit as far as I could to get closer to home to make the pick up by my brother a little easier. That was actually a mistake, I didn’t navigate the transit system well and it seems that there are no rules about where one can designate a restroom it seems that any wall at the bus station is fair-game. I did get a chance to wonder around downtown Chicago a bit, despite it’s flaws, it’s still a pretty cool city.
It was good to return home to my familiar tech and surrounding with a renewed sense of excitement to be a Linux enthusiasts. I took that energy and built myself a new workbench…
Final Thoughts
The Ubuntu Summit was a great experience for which I will be forever grateful I that I could be a participant. I met some really incredible people and learned so much at the talks and in the hallways. Meeting many people I have only seen online for the first time was a truly exciting experience and I sincerely hope I will be able to see them again. Such a fantastic and enriching experience that I will carry with me.
I may have an almost unhealthy obsession with the openSUSE Project as I continue to use and enjoy it in my daily life but I have to say, the fun and enthusiasm around Ubuntu and all it’s related projects is something to behold. The atmosphere was absolutely one where everyone was welcome and encouraged to be a part of a great community.
As a consequence of attending the Ubuntu Summit, I have a new-found admiration for everything Ubuntu. The care and thoughtfulness they have for their community is the gold-standard for community management. I truly couldn’t have asked for a better time.
References
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
Lenovo Legion Go
https://wimpress.itch.io/
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
https://www.asknoahshow.com/
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