I was fortunate enough to get my first opportunity to attend the Ubuntu Summit 2024 at the World Forum in the Hague. As someone who has used Linux in some capacity since about 2006 with my first experience of Ubuntu being 8.04 Hardy Heron it was safe to say I was quite excited to attend.

The conference itself was a great advocacy for the open source ecosystem with attendance from many key vendors and projects in this space. I came away from the conference inspired. It was great to experience how open source has influenced many people’s lives, from software engineers to creatives in the arts. I was especially impressed in the variety of talks, it really did have something for everyone.

Beyond the talks, the hallway track was particularly enjoyable, featuring some excellent booths that allowed me to experience things I hadn’t had the privilege to encounter first hand. Framework Laptop, System76 Launch Keyboard, Fairphone, Intel Arc GPU for AI purposes just to name a few things that ended up on my wish list when my current hardware is due a refresh. It was also a pleasure to speak to many like-minded individuals at the booths and throughout the conference.

I had an excellent time. Should I get the opportunity to do it again you can rest assured I will be there. One of my favourite conferences I’ve attended to date. Below are a selection of talks which I thoroughly enjoyed and would recommend checking out.

No, Open Source Didn’t Destroy My Creative Agency - Ryan Gorley

As someone who is not a creative it was truly inspirational to see Ryan advocating for the open source tools available in this space and is able to utilise them to make a living. The creative space is unfortunately dominated by proprietary offerings some which charge an extortionate amount monthly which can and probably has made creativity unreachable to many. I was able to speak to Ryan and other like minded people after the talk about whats available in this space and this exposed me to the Ubuntu Studio distribution which I will be encouraging my wife who is a creative to try out.

Servo: Building a Browser Rendering Engine in Rust - Rakhi Sharma

This talk was quite conveniently timed as I’ve only been aware of Servo since Mozilla once again shot themselves in the foot with their advertising blog post. Quite a remarkable undertaking to achieve what they have so far with this browser engine. I hope it continues and secures the necessary funding so we can enjoy greater choice in browsers. This talk and Servo itself gives me hope that we will have another choice in the future.

Engineering COSMIC DE: A Vision Realized - Carl Richell, Victoria Brekenfeld

It was great to see what the folks at System76 have been able to achieve with the COSMIC Desktop Environment. For an Alpha product it was quite incredible how stable and usable it was. What I did appreciate about this talk was the honesty that there will be bugs and being upfront about these bugs. Whilst I am very happy with the GNOME Desktop Environment at the moment I would certainly be keeping a close eye on COSMIC and would be tempted to try it out in the near future.

Master Advanced Anti-Ban & Web Scraping Techniques - Fabien Vauchelles

Having dabbled in some scraping myself I have hit a few issues in the past that have blocked me from scraping. This workshop exposed me to scrapoxy and I got the chance to try it hands on against a demo site using come common techniques to circumvent some of the common blocks implemented. I also fully appreciated the workshop being available on Github for future reference.

Open Platform for Enterprise AI - Christian Holsing

As someone who is currently working on an AI project, I fully appreciated what the OPEA project is trying to achieve here. Due to the rapid movement of the various AI ecosystem standards are lacking and everyone is implementing their solutions in their own way. The frameworks and blueprints that OPEA are creating is utilising open standards and technologies to create a open platform for GenAI. The project has contributions from some of the biggest industry players involved in AI so its something I will certainly be keeping a close eye on.

ROCm for AMD GPUs on Ubuntu - Cordell Bloor

This talk introduced me to AMD ROCm and the considerable amount of work being done by Cordell and the community to support a wider range of AMD GPU support for AI/ML workloads. It is excellent to see the work being done here will enable a wider range of devices and as a result will enable greater competition in the GPU market for AI/ML purposes.

Harnessing HTCondor: How DreamWorks Animation Orchestrates Massive Workloads for Feature Films - Mark Jackels

It was quite impressive to see the insights on how an animation studio structures and distributes its workload across 1800 workstations using HTCondor. Gives me a greater appreciation for the raw power required to produced some of the latest and greatest blockbuster animation movies. Can’t see me using this as I do not have a blockbuster budget but nevertheless was incredible to see the capabilities of this piece of free and open source software.

Framework Lightning Talk - Nirav Patel

Managing to swap your laptop hardware from x86 to RISC-V architecture in the space of a 5 minute lightning talk. I was amazed that it could be done. A true credit to the Framework brand. Certainly deserved the standing ovation they got for achieving this. They will certainly be on my radar when I am due a laptop refresh.