Andrew Pam spoke about new developments in Linux gaming and about hardware and OS support for games etc. He also described some interesting developments with Linux support for SMR disks [1].
Then we discussed Everything Open 2026 [2]. We had some discussion about some of the lectures including the final one which generated controversy (here is the playlist for EO 2026 lectures [3]).
We discussed ideas for running a more effective BOF on a difficult topic like FOSS on mobile phones. The main conclusions seemed to be to have more than 2 people chairing the BOF and more than 1 hour to run it. Maybe a BOF as an introduction to a hack evening.
Then we had discussions about the future of LUGs, the difficulty in getting interest in attending meetings, and to what extent YouTube replaces meetings. One conclusion was that we should publish videos of meetings even if they aren’t going to be interesting to most people. If 99% of people find that watching a meeting they can’t contribute to is boring then we get 1% who are interested and if the number of people who see the video is large enough then 1% becomes a good number.
We finished with discussing Linux promotion. There was a general feeling that a Linux Australia subcommittee dedicated to promoting Linux would be a good thing, I didn’t poll the people do determine who of the people who agreed it was a good idea were actually interested in doing the work.
I (Russell Coker) used my Furilabs FLX1s for the meeting and it worked well running Firefox talking to the Big Blue Button server but unfortunately Firefox wouldn’t work with the camera. This was a reasonable result and the 3 hour meeting used slightly over 50% of the phone’s battery which is much better than a Librem5 or PinePhone Pro could manage. For as yet unknown reasons my desktop PC didn’t want to talk to the webcam that I have been using for years.
The meeting had 10 people attending which isn’t a large meeting but was enough for many interesting discussions.
Topics for future meetings include using storage technology such as SMR disks which we also agreed was a good topic for ongoing discussions in the Matrix room over the course of weeks. Changing storage options is not a trivial thing and not something that can be done quickly or easily.
How to best run BOFs and workshops at conferences was agreed to be a topic that needs more discussion. We are talking about how to get things done efficiently for Everything Open 2027 aleady!
Digital sovereignty was briefly discussed in the meeting and agreed to be a topic for future meetings. It is a complex topic and we will break it down and address separate parts in different meetings. A meeting about “digital sovereignty” on it’s own is probably not going to have enough focus to achieve things. A meeting about a specific topic such as “which cloud to use” can get some good results.