Switch upgrades were done this morning, and something has gone wrong with them. Networking engineers are working on restoring full service.
ipv6 access to some of our services is impacted, along with possible slowdowns in other services.
Switch upgrades were done this morning, and something has gone wrong with them. Networking engineers are working on restoring full service.
ipv6 access to some of our services is impacted, along with possible slowdowns in other services.
admin )
on 2026-06-10 08:00:00 UTC
Flock to Fedora is more than a conference – it’s where the Fedora community comes alive. As part of the In the CommitHistory campaign, we sat down with confirmed Flock 2026 speakers to hear their stories: what brought them to Fedora, what Flock means to them personally, and what they’re hoping for in Prague this June. This is one of those conversations.
Jaroslav Reznik has been part of Fedora longer than most people remember. This goes all the way back to Red Hat Linux 5, before Fedora was even known as Fedora. After a brief detour to another distro, he joined the KDE SIG days and went on to build a long career in Red Hat’s Program Management team. But it was the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) that brought him back to the Fedora community.
The moment that changed everything? A scene at FUDCon North America in 2009 watching Fedora’s Program Manager command what looked like a sci-fi control room, scheduling Fedora 13. Jaroslav looked at that and thought: I want that job. Years later, he got it.
On the CRA, Jaroslav is clear and passionate. The regulation is the first to formally acknowledge the existence of open source software in legislation. Thanks to an enormous community effort, it’s actually open-source friendly. Non-commercialised community projects are fully exempt. For a project like Fedora, the concept of open-source stewards formally recognised in the regulation opens up a powerful new model for governance.
The program management team is working to build a stewardship governance model around Fedora. They are making it a welcoming place for anyone who wants to support the project. They are clear about what stewardship should and shouldn’t be: it’s not about monetizing open source or adding burdens, it’s about helping the community raise the bar for security together.
Flock holds a special place for Jaroslav; he co-organised the very first Flock held in Prague back in 2014. Now, more than ten years later, he is returning to Prague for Flock 2026 with Roman Zhukov to not only talk about the CRA but run a hands-on workshop on it. His message is simple: you can’t do things from behind a desk.
Flock to Fedora 2026 takes place June 14–16 in Prague. Registration is at capacity but you can join the waitlist. Can’t make it in person? Follow along live on the Fedora YouTube channel.We hope to see you there!
Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used in drafting this article. The content was reviewed and verified before publishing.
admin )
on 2026-06-09 09:08:39 UTC
We, the Forge team, recently onboarded a Codeberg-hosted repo to the new Fedora Konflux instance.
This is a guide based on the onboarding experience, the steps and UI are similar in Fedora’s Forge.
oc login): https://api.kflux-fedora-01.84db.p1.openshiftapps.com:6443Konflux configuration is managed through GitOps in the
tenants-config
repo on GitLab. The UI is intended to be read-only — you should do everything through merge requests.
Follow the instructions in the
tenants-config repo:
create-tenant-resources playbook. It generates the namespace, RBACYou end up with three files:
ns.yaml — the namespace with a konflux-ci.dev/type: tenant labelrbac.yaml — a RoleBinding granting konflux-admin-user-actions to your FASkustomization.yaml — ties together the quota, RBAC, namespace and yourThen run the update-tenant-apps playbook to generate an ArgoCD application
manifest per tenant directory and update the ArgoCD kustomization.
This is where you tell Konflux what to build. We went with a Kustomize
Configuration-as-Code setup with three layers:
git-provider: forgejo, git-provider-url: https://codeberg.org),build.appstudio.openshift.io/request: configure-pacOpen a merge request with everything
Example MR.
Each Component needs a matching ImageRepository CR. If you don’t have one, the image controller
never provisions a Quay repo, spec.containerImage stays empty on the
Component, and the build service just sits there waiting. No webhook, no PaC PR,
nothing happens.
Example ImageRepository:
apiVersion: appstudio.redhat.com/v1alpha1
kind: ImageRepository
metadata:
name: forge-rawhide-production
namespace: fedora-infra-tenant
annotations:
image-controller.appstudio.redhat.com/update-component-image: "true"
labels:
appstudio.redhat.com/application: forge-production
appstudio.redhat.com/component: forge-rawhide-production
spec:
image:
name: fedora-infra-tenant/forge-rawhide-production
visibility: publicThe update-component-image: "true" annotation is what tells the image
controller to write the Quay URL back to spec.containerImage on the Component.
Example MR. Do not merge yet.
Konflux needs a secret to authenticate with your Forgejo/Codeberg instance:
oc create secret generic pipelines-as-code-codeberg
-n {namespace}
--type=kubernetes.io/basic-auth
--from-literal=password={FORGEJO_TOKEN}
oc label secret pipelines-as-code-codeberg -n {namespace}
appstudio.redhat.com/credentials=scm
appstudio.redhat.com/scm.host=codeberg.orgThe Konflux docs
say you need these token scopes:
Don’t restrict the token to a specific repo — scopes like write:user aren’t
available with repo-scoped tokens on Forgejo. If you set the right scopes and
it still complains about insufficient permissions, try a token with everything
enabled.
With the secret in place, merge your MR. ArgoCD picks it up and syncs the
resources. Wait a few minutes, then check:
# Did containerImage get set?
oc get components -n {namespace}
-o custom-columns='NAME:.metadata.name,IMAGE:.spec.containerImage'
# Are the ImageRepositories ready?
oc get imagerepositories -n {namespace}
-o custom-columns='NAME:.metadata.name,STATE:.status.state'
# What does the PaC status say?
oc get components -n {namespace}
-o custom-columns='NAME:.metadata.name,STATUS:.metadata.annotations.build.appstudio.openshift.io/status'If spec.containerImage is filled in and the status shows "state":"enabled",
you’re good.
At this point Konflux opens PRs on your source repo with auto-generated Tekton
pipeline files in .tekton/. Two ways to go:
.tekton/ files,output-image pointing to quay.io/redhat-user-workloads/{namespace}/{component}@sha256:... refs from theserviceAccountName: build-pipeline-{component}We went with the second option. We already had pipelines with custom version
tagging that we wanted to keep, so we pulled in the new task bundles and labels
from the generated files and left the rest alone.
The configure-pac annotation gets consumed on the first attempt. If it fails
(token issue, rate limit, whatever), you need to re-add it:
# One component
oc annotate component {component} -n {namespace}
build.appstudio.openshift.io/request=configure-pac --overwrite
# All of them
for comp in $(oc get components -n {namespace} -o name); do
oc annotate $comp -n {namespace}
build.appstudio.openshift.io/request=configure-pac --overwrite
doneTo sum it up, we created a tenant on Konflux-ci cluster, created applications and components and set a place where the images would be hosted. At the event of push to the codeberg repo main branch – the repo where we store the Forge Containerfiles, the pipeline gets triggered (scoped by the on-cel-expression to only those contexts where the change happened) and a fresh and tagged image appears on quay, ready for further testing and deployment.
Thanks to the Konflux Team for the Forgejo support!
The post Onboarding a Forgejo-hosted project to Fedora Konflux appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-06-09 08:00:00 UTC
Petr Boy came to Fedora documentation the way many contributors do, by seeing a gap and deciding to fill it. As a researcher, writing is his daily work. When he looked at how he could meaningfully contribute to Fedora, documentation was the obvious answer. He started with Fedora Core 1, stepped away, and returned in 2020 when both the Server Working Group and the Docs Team were being revitalised at the same time. Since then, his focus has been on the “bigger-picture” content structure, readability, consistency, and inspiring others to get involved.
His first Flock was in Cork, Ireland in 2023, and what struck him most was the collaborative approach combined with open, structured dialogue and the sheer range of personalities all genuinely trying to get to know each other.
For a team like Docs, where so much depends on shared standards and careful communication, Petr sees Flock as irreplaceable. New ideas emerge from spontaneous conversation, something the formal structure of video calls simply can’t replicate. His message to anyone thinking about contributing? Fedora needs far more than technical contributors. Documentation, communication, community building these are all vital, and Fedora needs to do a better job of making that visible. At Flock 2026, he is most looking forward to the working groups and the hallway conversations, the ones that are simply too nuanced to have any other way.
Flock to Fedora 2026 takes place June 14–16 in Prague. Registration is at capacity but you can join the waitlist. Can’t make it in person? Follow along live on the Fedora YouTube channel.We hope to see you there!
Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used in drafting this article. The content was reviewed and verified before publishing.
admin )
on 2026-06-08 08:00:00 UTC
Flock to Fedora is more than a conference – it’s where the Fedora community comes alive. As part of the CommitHistory campaign, we sat down with confirmed Flock 2026 speakers to hear their stories: what brought them to Fedora, what Flock means to them personally, and what they’re hoping for in Prague this June. This is one of those conversations.
Jona Azizaj’s first Flock was ten years ago in Kraków, Poland. What struck her most was how approachable everyone was. In a community full of experienced contributors, people made space for new voices, listened to her experiences building the local community in Albania, and made her feel like her perspective genuinely mattered. Those small moments, she says, are what made her feel like she truly belonged.
A decade on, Jona sees Flock as one of the most powerful tools for growing the next generation of Fedora contributors. Online mentorship happens asynchronously and at a distance. Flock, however, creates something different: the chance to sit down with someone, share experiences, and build real trust. Flock is where contributors grow more confident, find their place, and realise that open source is about far more than technical work.
For Flock 2026, Jona and the Fedora Mentor Summit team are bringing three initiatives, now in their 5th edition.
A successful Flock, for Jona, is one where people leave feeling more confident than when they arrived. It is an event where the connections built there carry on long after the event ends.
Flock to Fedora 2026 takes place June 14–16 in Prague. Registration is at capacity but you can join the waitlist. Can’t make it in person? Follow along live on the Fedora YouTube channel.We hope to see you there!
Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used in drafting this article. The content was reviewed and verified before publishing.
admin )
on 2026-06-05 15:07:06 UTC
Flock to Fedora is more than a conference – it’s where the Fedora community comes alive. As part of the In the Commit History campaign, we sat down with confirmed Flock 2026 speakers to hear their stories: what brought them to Fedora, what Flock means to them personally, and what they’re hoping for in Prague this June. This is one of those conversations.
Akashdeep’s history with Flock goes back around five years, and his perspective on it has evolved significantly. During his time on the Fedora Council, he participated in the grueling process of reviewing over 150 talk proposals in a single cycle. This task was made harder by the fact that acceptance is often tied to sponsored travel meaning funding rejection can mean a contributor simply can’t attend at all.
But beyond the sessions and schedules, Akashdeep is emphatic about what Flock is really for. Roughly 75% of the experience is about human connection; understanding the person behind the screen, building friendships, and embodying the “friends foundation” philosophy at the heart of Fedora. Technical work is the bonus, not the point.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the story of the Fedora Badges revamp. Interest in rebuilding the platform which, despite its 2003-era interface, plays a vital role in motivating new contributors, dates back to 2019. But it was Flock’s hallway conversations and dedicated workshops that finally built the consensus needed to move the project forward.
Akashdeep also wants people to know that contributing to Fedora infrastructure is more accessible than it looks. You don’t need to be on a specific team or work for a particular company. Just join a chat, introduce yourself, and find your corner. As one contributor discovered, starting with documentation led to a whole journey into diversity and inclusion work. Community bonding is what keeps people, and the technical work is the reward.
Flock to Fedora 2026 takes place June 14–16 in Prague. Registration is at capacity but you can join the waitlist. Can’t make it in person? Follow along live on the Fedora YouTube channel.We hope to see you there!
Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used in drafting this article. The content was reviewed and verified before publishing.
admin )
on 2026-06-05 10:00:00 UTC
This is a report created by CLE Team, which is a team containing community members working in various Fedora groups for example Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Quality etc. This team is also moving forward some initiatives inside Fedora project.
Week: 01 – 05 June 2026
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in Fedora infrastructure.
Ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream.
CentOS ticket tracker
CentOS Stream ticket tracker
This is the summary of the work done regarding the RISC-V architecture in Fedora.
This is the summary of the work done regarding AI in Fedora.
This team is taking care of quality of Fedora. Maintaining CI, organizing test days
and keeping an eye on overall quality of Fedora releases.
This team is working on introduction of https://forge.fedoraproject.org to Fedora
and migration of repositories from pagure.io.
This team is working on keeping Epel running and helping package things.
This team is working on improving User experience. Providing artwork, user experience,
usability, and general design services to the Fedora project
If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #admin:fedoraproject.org channel on matrix.
The post Community Update – Week 23 2026 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
You attended Flock 2026, the Fedora contributor conference, in Prague, Czech Republic
admin )
on 2026-06-04 21:00:00 UTC
Fedora Infrastructure team will be applying updates to servers and rebooting them.
Many services will be affected, most should only be down for a short time as their particular resources are rebooted HOWEVER some may be down for a non-trivial amount of time due to RHEL-9 to RHEL-10 upgrades.
In …
admin )
on 2026-06-04 08:00:00 UTC
Flock to Fedora is more than a conference — it’s where the Fedora community comes alive. As part of the #In the CommitHistory campaign, we sat down with confirmed Flock 2026 speakers to hear their stories: what brought them to Fedora, what Flock means to them personally, and what they’re hoping for in Prague this June. This is one of those conversations.
Aleksandra Fedorova’s journey into Fedora started with a sticker. At LinuxTag in Berlin, her first properly organised Linux community event she approached the Fedora booth simply wanting a sticker. What happened next changed everything. The people behind the booth invited her to join them on their side of the table. That single gesture dismantled the wall between user and contributor, and she never looked back.
For Aleksandra, Flock isn’t the place for deep technical work. Instead, it’s where the Fedora Council reads the room, sensing priorities, spotting coordination gaps, and picking up on tensions before they become real problems. She’s also refreshingly honest about Flock’s limitations: the costs of attending mean it’s not always a fully representative cross-section of the community, and understanding the broader Fedora ecosystem requires deliberate effort beyond the event itself.
But what Flock offers that nothing else can? The human element. No mailing list or Matrix channel lets you simply walk up to someone and start a conversation without a formal introduction. At Flock, the hallway is as valuable as the schedule. For Flock 2026, Aleksandra hopes the event helps ease current tensions; the reminder that everyone is working toward the same goal, even when they disagree on how to get there, is something only being in the same room together can provide.
Flock to Fedora 2026 takes place June 14–16 in Prague. Registration is at capacity but you can join the waitlist. Can’t make it in person? Follow along live on the Fedora YouTube channel.We hope to see you there!
Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used in drafting this article. The content was reviewed and verified before publishing.
admin )
on 2026-06-03 19:19:57 UTC
Yes, the Fedora 43 upgrade brought an interesting revelation for all Outlook users—one that Microsoft is unlikely to be thrilled about. Outlook was not encrypting email connections, even though SSL/TLS was clearly enabled in the account settings. It looks like, that bug dates back to at least Outlook 2007, which is the oldest Outlook version I was informed about.
Every six months, Fedora Servers require and upgrade to the next release version, as you all know 
This May we had to upgrade from 42 to 43 and in this upgrade, Dovecot POP/IMAP server switched to version 2.4.3. Dovecot did us all an unexpected favor, because it required a full rewrite of the used service config, because it’s not backwards compatible. This change introduced a new paradigm: PLAIN TEXT passwords are no longer allowed over unencrypted connections.
This is a major break with the oldest RFCs (i.e. RFC 1081) regarding POP3 behavior, but a good one IMHO. No one should still use unencrypted connections to any form of service on the internet when we have easy to use encryption protocols like STARTTLS (STLS) at hand in any major client.
After the upgrade, “we” (admins & customers) did not even know about the now broken auth-mechanism. This came a day later when customers started to call the support line about rquesters popping up for them to enter their passwords again. This is a normal behavior if auth fails… and it failed hard
As all admins know, such upgrades will result in higher amounts of support calls. To my surprise it was all Outlook clients that called. The oldest version so far was Outlook 2007. We even had an old MACOS Outlook :-). They all had in common, that the mailbox prefs had “SSL/TLS” enabled, but used Port 110, which is the old cleartext port for POP3, where port 995 is the correct SSL port. A normal mailclient would change the port number to 995 as soon as you enable SSL/TLS encryption. This is because you can’t “speak” SSL on a non-ssl port, except if you choose STARTTLS. This starts as a cleartext connection, but upgrades itself to ssl-encrypted later.
Outlook did the worst move you can take as a security enhanced app. It silently ignored the choosen SSL option and used the unencrypted port 110 without any notice to the user. After our server upgrade, the following message popped up:
“-ERR [AUTH] Cleartext authentication disallowed on non -secure ( SSL/TLS ) connections.“ popped up if you tried to open your inbox. The server logs revealed it clearly: the user used a non-secure connection and got this message correctly. This never got noticed since the EU GDRP only states, that corporations and organisations need to protect their data via a transport encryption like TLS. Normal persons don’t need to do so.
Even some of the notable folks of Fedora did not use encryption, which I personally advise to change immediately. Having this in mind, who are we to judge if you encrypt your connection or not?
You can easily check if TLS encryption is working. Send yourself an mail and open the mail headers, you will find lines like this:
Received: from bastion01.fedoraproject.org ([38.145.32.11] helo=bastion.fedoraproject.org)
by s113.resellerdesktop.de with esmtps (TLS1.3) tls TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
(Exim 4.99.2)
(envelope-from <updates@fedoraproject.org>)
…
Any good MTA ( Exim, Postfix, etc. ) will note if the connection was encrypted or not.
If you don’t see an encryption notice, you can use this command:
tcpdump -A -n -n port 110 or port 143
in a root terminal and see if the unencrypted port is used for transport. If so, if it’s cleartext or if it’s using STLS.
So… THANKS Fedora 43 and Dovecot 2.4 … you revealed a 20 year old security bug in Outlook \o/
Disclaimer: It is possible that MS patched the Outlook UI in the past in a way that only old accounts are affected by this major fail. As Fedora users we had no Outlook available to test this
admin )
on 2026-06-03 08:00:00 UTC
Flock to Fedora is more than a conference – it’s where the Fedora community comes alive. As part of the In the CommitHistory campaign, we sat down with confirmed Flock 2026 speakers to hear their stories: what brought them to Fedora, what Flock means to them personally, and what they’re hoping for in Prague this June. This is one of those conversations.
Valentin Rothberg’s journey into container-native Linux didn’t start with a grand plan – it started with the work. After over 8 years at Red Hat contributing to projects like Podman and bootable containers, Fedora felt like the natural home for his next chapter. In Summer 2025 he began working on Project Hummingbird, which builds directly on top of Fedora. Flock 2026 is where he wants to share what he’s learned.
His first Flock was in Budapest in 2019 – and he remembers it vividly. Stepping in at the last minute for Dan Walsh, he ended up presenting for over three hours straight on container technologies. Not a bad way to make an entrance.
For Valentin, Flock’s value isn’t primarily technical. Technical decisions tend to be made comparatively fast once a group of people rally around a cause. What matters is finding that cause together, and in-person time is what makes that possible. The implementation details, he says, are just details.
He’s also refreshingly honest about where Fedora stands in the container ecosystem. Despite being the birthplace of tools like Podman, Fedora containers don’t see wide use outside the community. Valentin has ideas about why, and how to change that. He’s coming to Flock not to present answers, but to hear other perspectives and build something together.
Flock to Fedora 2026 takes place June 14–16 in Prague. Registration is at capacity but you can join the waitlist. Can’t make it in person? Follow along live on the Fedora YouTube channel. We hope to see you there!
Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used in drafting this article. The content was reviewed and verified before publishing.
admin )
on 2026-06-02 22:40:26 UTC
Flock to Fedora is more than a conference – it’s where the Fedora community comes alive. As part of the “CommitHistory” campaign, we sat down with confirmed Flock 2026 speakers to hear their stories: what brought them to Fedora, what Flock means to them personally, and what they’re hoping for in Prague this June. This is one of those conversations.
Jef Spaleta came back to Fedora at exactly the right moment. After years away, working across software startups and following his spouse’s move back to the east coast, the timing aligned perfectly with the previous project leader stepping down. With a sharpened skill set and fresh perspective, Jef felt ready to lead.
But leading Fedora in 2026 isn’t just about keeping the lights on. Jef sees the project at a critical crossroads. There is a generational transition where original founders are stepping away and institutional knowledge risks disappearing with them. His focus? Mentoring the next wave of contributors to keep Fedora sustainable for the next five to ten years.
On the state of the project, Jef is honest: Fedora continues to ship high-quality releases on schedule, a streak held for five or six years. But stability isn’t enough. He is developing a new Fedora innovation lifecycle, a dedicated space for experimental work where things can be tried, broken, and learned from without disrupting the mature processes the project depends on.
For Jef, Flock’s value is simple but profound. Digital tools work well when everyone agrees, but they fall apart when things get hard. Flock is where relationship repair happens, where tone and intent can finally be communicated in ways text never can. Looking ahead to Flock 2026, he is focusing on two priorities. First, migrating Forge infrastructure to meet the expectations of the next generation of developers, and second, shaping Fedora’s approach to AI-assisted development before the conversation shapes itself.
Flock to Fedora 2026 takes place June 14–16 in Prague. Registration is at capacity but you can join the waitlist. Can’t make it in person? Follow along live on the Fedora YouTube channel. We hope to see you there!
Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used in drafting this article. The content was reviewed and verified before publishing.
admin )
on 2026-06-02 14:11:26 UTC
Maybe it was a one-line typo fix in the docs. Perhaps it was a package you’d been maintaining in secret for months before you finally submitted it. Maybe it was completely terrifying, or maybe it just felt like the most natural thing in the world. Whatever it was we want to hear about it.
Ahead of Flock to Fedora 2026 (June 14–16, Prague), We the Fedora CommOps team are launching #Commit History: a community campaign to collect the origin stories of Fedora contributors – the moments that brought people into this project and kept them here.
The best stories will be featured in a Fedora Magazine article published before Flock 2026, celebrating the people who make this project what it is.
Here are the questions used to get started-
There are no wrong answers. First commits come in all shapes code, documentation, translations, design, bug reports, community work. If you’ve ever contributed to Fedora, your story belongs here.
How to share: Drop your story in the comments below, or share it on Mastodon with the hashtag #Commit History.
Whether you’ve been contributing for a decade or made your first commit last week – we want to hear from you.
admin )
on 2026-06-02 09:00:00 UTC
Fedora Copr build queue processing will be stopped during this outage while copr-backend is upgraded to new version.
DNF packages and repositories will remain available.
The F44 elections voting period is now open! The ballot boxes for this cycles elections are open from today, Monday June 1st until Friday, June 12th on the elections app. The ballot boxes will close on June 12th at 23:59:59 UTC.
For links to candidate interviews, please visit this post or the nominations wiki page of each election.
As the number of eligible candidates (4) equaled the number of open seats (4) for the EPEL Steering Committee, no ballot box is available for this election. Instead, these candidates are automatically elected by default.
Good luck to all of our candidates across Fedora Council, FESCo and Mindshare Committee during this election cycle!
The post F44 Elections Vote Now! appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
The F44 election interviews are now live. With seats open across all leadership groups, this is one of our most popular election cycles yet! Use this post to navigate to candidates interview posts easily.
Voting will be open on Monday, June 1st and will close at 23:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th. Best of luck to all our candidates!
Fedora Council – 2 seats open
Fedora Engineering Steering Committee/FESCo – 5 seats open
Fedora Mindshare Committee – 4 seats open
EPEL Steering Committee – 4 seats
The post F44 Elections Interviews appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:59:20 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
Jonathan Wright, jonathanspw
I’ve been a consumer of EPEL for…a long time. 20 years? I’ve been a contributor to EPEL for about the past 5, and on the EPEL steering committee for the past year.
EPEL is very near and dear to my heart and is actually how I got involved with Fedora. I’m on the AlmaLinux team and like everyone else, the first thing I do when installing AlmaLinux (previously CentOS) is dnf install epel-release. I’ve successfully graduated packages from EPEL that ultimately got picked up by RHEL (see Valkey) and work to make EL distros more usable by having an array of package availability that’s not otherwise available without EPEL.
I have a unique perspective to bring to the table with my history in web hosting and long time usage of RHEL and its clones (CentOS and now AlmaLinux). The past year serving on the EPEL steering committee has been a great honor and I hope to continue in that role for another year.
The post F44 EPEL Elections: Interview with Jonathan Wright (jonathanspw) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:56:04 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
My relationship with open source started back in 2006, and I’ve been an
advocate since, both by contributing to various projects and by publishing
my own. My deep dive into EPEL began in 2013 while working in a company doing
R&D work for local industries, where I gained my first practical
experience with RPM packaging. This early work gave me a solid understanding
of what it means to build and manage software within the Enterprise Linux context.
More recently, I joined Red Hat in 2021 to work as part of the
CLE Team, where I deepened my understanding of how to become a proper Fedora packager
and contributor. I have been working together with Carl George, focusing on the
needs of EPEL by participating in steering meetings and doing work
regarding the project’s infrastructure. Through this position, I was able to
participate in activities such as packaging, writing documentation and SOPs,
collaborating on maintenance work required for the infrastructure, and improving
infrastructure automation. Furthermore, during steering meetings, I have been able to
add my viewpoints and insights when they were needed, and I was also able to
take on some of the steering team’s workload,
such as the Forgejo migration.
Over the last few years, while spending time on the infrastructure side of the project,
I’ve seen first-hand the ups and downs of the project, which has enabled me to
collaborate closely with members of the community.
The EPEL steering committee is already a place where I have been able to
use my experience and knowledge to support and contribute to the project.
However, this time I want a vote on these topics. This will allow me to
collaborate further, helping to turn those discussions into a better
path for the project. I want to continue helping the community so
that the project can continue to grow into a great
platform by ensuring our governance is as solid and reliable as our processes.
For the sake of transparency, even if I wrote the text myself, I also used a local LLM (Gemma4:e4b) to iteratively fix the text’s grammar and flow.
The post F44 EPEL Elections: Interview with Diego Herrera (dherrera) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:52:36 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I got my start in Fedora and EPEL in 2014. I was working for Rackspace and joined a team whose primary purpose was to maintain IUS, a third-party package repository for RHEL. Part of my work there involved contributing to and maintaining EPEL packages. I left Rackspace in 2019 to join the CentOS team at Red Hat. In 2021, I started a new team at Red Hat to specifically focus on EPEL activities.
During my time on the EPEL team, I’ve lead the design and implementation of EPEL 9 and EPEL 10. These releases each brought significant improvements to packager workflows and user experience, especially the introduction of minor versions in EPEL 10. We’re currently in the early days of planning EPEL 11, with a focus on continued refinement and quality.
Aside from the hands-on technical work of EPEL release engineering and packaging, I routinely attend conferences to deliver presentations about EPEL and staff Fedora/CentOS booths to engage with the EPEL community. I enjoy mentoring new packagers and helping existing Fedora packagers get started with EPEL.
I have been on the EPEL Steering Committee since 2020. I have enjoyed my six years serving on the committee, and hope to have the opportunity to continue this important work. I am passionate about EPEL and I am committed to continue finding ways to improve the EPEL experience for both packagers and users.
The post F44 EPEL Elections: Interview with Carl George (carlwgeorge) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:45:50 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
Troy Dawson (tdawson)
I started contributing to EPEL 11 years ago with some nodejs packages for OpenShift. I later added rubygems and golang packages as OpenShift changed languages. Later, RHEL 8 did not have KDE, so I added KDE to epel8, and have been maintaining KDE in epel ever since. I have picked up many other packages during the years, but I think my KDE contributions are what I am most known for.
I’ve been the EPEL Steering Committee chair since 2020, taking over from Stephen Smoogen. A lot of changes have happened since then, most of them for the better. I’m not responsible for all the changes, but it’s been wonderful being part of the committee as these changes have come through.
EPEL has grown to be part of my professional and personal life. I not only want to contribute to it, but help steer it’s growth and progression. I think as a EPEL Steering Committee member, I can help keep EPEL healthy and thriving.
The post F44 EPEL Elections: Interview with Troy Dawson (tdawson) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:37:26 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
Since the past year, I have been actively contributing to the event planning [1] [2] and proposal curation in the Mindshare committee. Representing our vested interests in the Fedora Council, I have paved the way for improvements in the regional event support (i.e., event owners and regional inventory), digital ambassadorship (i.e., swagpack designs and social media) and recognition service (i.e., Community Metrics and Fedora Badges).
Besides championing our community presence in underrepresented regions (e.g., in DevConf.IN 2026 and FOSSAsia 2026 in APAC), I have continued staying at the forefront of the Fedora Forge community initiative, working as an infrastructure architect for Fedora Infrastructure applications, organizing Fedora Mentor Summit during Flock events and mentoring budding contributors formally/informally in the community.
Technology might be why I joined the Fedora Project, but I stayed because of the people who made me feel at home. Progressing in various aspects of our planned functions over the past years has taught me one crucial thing – contributors are actually retained when they feel noticed, supported and trusted with meaningful work. The Mindshare Committee is where that happens, and I want to keep building what we started.
Furthermore, as the committee’s representative to the Fedora Council, I have seen firsthand how decisions at the governance level shape the contributor experience on the grassroots level. The update during the Fedora Council Strategy Summit 2026 gave us an opportunity to serve event organizers, community ambassadors and voluntary contributors better, all while using these outcomes to enhance the community health.
Simple. We need to show up where the community is. A community booth in one event, some interactive workshops in another – to begin with in regional event support to ultimately show people that we indeed care. While making sure that our infographic swagpacks are updated on a regular basis in digital ambassadorship, we actually ensure that we are providing people with reasons to come back to us when the time is right.
With the upcoming collectible rarity feature in Fedora Badges and tangible contributor recognition awards (both as a part of Fedora Mentor Summit event and separately), we nudge people to more opportune contribution avenues while avoiding burnouts in longtime contributors. This could further be extended to our Fedora Linux Release Parties too, as ultimately, most of our community members started off as its users.
Contributor Recognition. With over half a decade of experience in this space, the “What now?” problem (after the first contribution) has only become worse with the advent of AI Assisted Contribution Activities. Newcomers struggle to realize the value proposition of the community connection that Fedora Project could provide, and hence, it has become the need of the hour to incentivize contributions using rewarding activities.
But apart from that, we also need to do better at further improving our local presence in underrepresented regions. In this past term, my pilot experiment on APAC events worked wonders, and it showed us all the community power we can tap into by just being there. With reusable swagpacks, localized printing, active conversations and documented accounts, this limited experiment can scale well across various parts of the globe.
The post F44 Mindshare Elections: Interview with Akashdeep Dhar (t0xic0der) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:33:17 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
My background in Fedora is using the Java programming language from Oracle and I have worked on games and graphics with Java language. I am currently writing computer programs for other computer languages which are Python, JavaScript in nodeJS and Building/Maintaining WordPress websites using PHP, HTML5 and CSS3.
I want to help bring people together and support the culture around Fedora, not just the technical work. Fedora is more than just an operating system to me — it’s a community. I want everyone who contributes, whether they code, design, or help run events, to feel valued and know their work matters.
I would propose a recurring, informal ” Monthly Community News” session—open to all—where Mindshare members discuss why certain decisions were made, rather than just reporting the results. Also to be a place for any updates or events to be introduced or announced so that it may generate more interest to all.
Mindshare should act as the “connective tissue.” I want to focus on creating a standardized, project-wide mentorship framework that assists sub-projects in bringing in new contributors.
The post F44 Mindshare Elections: Interview with Mackenzie Stewart (monkeybean12) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:27:42 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I started with Fedora through Discussion, our Fedora Help Desk. This helped me both learn and teach about Fedora.
Once I found Matrix, I quickly got involved as a member and sponsor with Join, where I to this day very much enjoy meeting and welcoming many new people.
As I continued over the past couple of years, I have progressed to many people facing roles such as helping with DEI and CommOps. I also stick my beak into Mindshare and Council topics while trying to not step on peoples toes.
These days I have started writing Docs such as the Beginners Guide to Fedora and I am now helping with Server where we are developing new Beginners Guides to Server and the upcoming Home Lab.
Mindshare suites me very well as I have extensive experience organising events and doing outreach for professional organisations such as Amnesty International Australia and a political party (which I won’t name as politics is too divisive – but feel free to ask me about it).
My personal motivation is that I enjoy working with people in the Fedora community.
The role of Mindshare has changed over the last couple of cycles to be more focussed on events. I would promote people to talk early and often to us, so we can put more smaller events on the table.
I think Mindshare needs a clearer idea of what budget we have to work with, and we need faster responses to ticketed issues.
We also need to improve the accessible roads to ambassadorship, both in person and digital. Taking my skills from Join, I would extend this to being available to help plan broader small group involvement with communities all over the globe.
The post F44 Mindshare Elections: Interview with Mat Holmes (theprogram) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:25:36 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
jnsamyak, and most people in the community know me by jnsamyak as well 
#releng:fedoraproject.org #admin:fedoraproject.org #release-day:fedora.im #devel:fedoraproject.org #mindshare:fedoraproject.org #social:fedoraproject.org #design:fedoraproject.orgSince this is mindshare, Samyak wanted to do something innovative and creative for keeping mindshare spirit alive.
I currently work as a Fedora Release Engineer and have helped lead multiple Fedora Linux releases, including Fedora Linux 42, Fedora Linux 43, and most recently Fedora Linux 44. My work primarily involves release coordination, compose workflows, branching, signing operations, automation improvements, and ensuring smooth release execution across Fedora infrastructure.
Over time, I’ve also contributed toward improving release documentation, mentoring contributors, coordinating release-day activities, and helping newer contributors understand Fedora Release Engineering workflows.
Before Fedora, I contributed to Debian, primarily around Kotlin and Ruby packaging. When I joined Fedora, one of the first things that stood out to me was how welcoming and community-driven Fedora felt. Fedora India meetings became my first real social entry point into the Fedora ecosystem, and from there, I gradually became more involved in both technical and community activities.
Beyond Release Engineering, my Fedora journey has always been deeply community-focused. Some of the initiatives and events I’ve been involved in include:
One experience that particularly shaped my perspective was attending FOSSASIA 2026 as part of Fedora’s APAC outreach efforts. It gave me a much broader understanding of how rapidly open source communities are growing in Asia and how different communities actively engage contributors in the region.
That experience reinforced something important for me: Fedora already has incredible technical foundations and strong community values — but we can do much more in terms of visibility, onboarding, storytelling, and contributor engagement across APAC.
I also currently serve as an Outreachy mentor for the Fedora Release Planner Scheduler project, helping contributors navigate Fedora workflows, collaboration practices, and open source contribution processes.
For me, Fedora has never been only about releases or infrastructure. It has always been about building a welcoming and empowering community around open source.
My motivation comes from the grassroots experiences I’ve had throughout my Fedora journey. I’ve experienced Fedora from multiple perspectives:
And one thing became very clear to me: communities do not grow only through technology — they grow through people feeling connected, supported, recognized, and welcomed.
Mindshare sits at the center of that experience.
A major part of this motivation comes from my experiences in APAC communities. I’ve met incredibly talented contributors who often remain unseen simply because they lack visibility, opportunities, guidance, or regional representation. I want to help change that.
Mentoring contributors through Outreachy and interacting with contributors during conferences like FOSSASIA and Flock made me realize how important human connection is in open source communities. Many contributors do not stay because of technology alone — they stay because:
That is one of the biggest reasons why I want to contribute more actively through Mindshare. My goal is not just to organize events or discussions, but to help create:
Fedora’s vision talks about creating a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive and welcoming communities. That vision strongly resonates with me, and I want to actively help bring that vision closer to reality.
I believe Mindshare visibility improves when contributors can clearly see its impact in their day-to-day Fedora experience. Right now, many contributors still don’t fully know what Mindshare does, how it supports contributors, how regional communities can engage with it, or how contributors can benefit from its initiatives.
I’d like to focus on making Mindshare feel more visible, approachable, interactive, and community-connected across three areas:
Regional Community Spotlights
Introduce lightweight contributor and regional showcases highlighting APAC contributors, Fedora event organizers, mentors and advocates, community success stories, and new contributors making an impact. Sometimes even a simple spotlight can motivate someone to contribute more.
Better Contributor Onboarding and Retention
Help encourage contributor roadmaps by interest area, beginner-friendly onboarding guides, mentorship checkpoints, lightweight follow-up systems, and easier discovery of Fedora teams and opportunities. The contributor journey should feel exciting — not confusing.
Stronger APAC Engagement
Encourage more regional collaboration, Fedora representation at local FOSS events, community-driven mini events and workshops, localized outreach content, timezone-friendly engagement opportunities, and better contributor recognition from APAC communities. There are many hidden Fedora heroes across APAC, and I want to help amplify their stories.
More Interactive DEI Engagement
Explore more interactive approaches such as regional contributor stories, Fedora social storytelling campaigns, contributor experience videos, cultural exchange sessions, community-led DEI discussions, and language-inclusive engagement initiatives. Sometimes even a small welcoming effort can have a lifelong impact on someone entering open source for the first time.
The biggest area that needs attention is contributor growth and retention — especially across underrepresented regions like APAC. I would specifically focus on three major areas:
1. APAC Visibility and Contributor Recognition
There is immense untapped contributor potential in APAC. I want to help improve regional visibility, encourage local leadership, increase contributor recognition, strengthen cross-community collaboration, and build a stronger regional Fedora identity. Even small recognition efforts can significantly motivate contributors and make them feel valued.
2. Contributor Retention and Mentorship
We need smoother and more approachable contributor journeys. I’d love to help encourage structured onboarding pathways, defined contributor milestones, team-specific starter guides, mentorship and feedback loops, easier first-contribution experiences, and better newcomer follow-up systems. The goal is simple: make contributors feel supported from their very first interaction with Fedora.
3. Human-Centered Community Building and DEI
Fedora is one of the most technically strong communities in open source, but what truly makes it special is its people. I want to help strengthen community interaction, social engagement, inclusive participation, DEI-focused storytelling, contributor appreciation, and community belonging.
Ultimately, I want Fedora to continue being a place where contributors from every background feel welcomed, valued, heard, and inspired to stay.
While contributors may forget specific technical tasks over time, they always remember how a community made them feel.
The post F44 Mindshare Elections: Interview with Samyak Jain (jnsamyak) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 22:23:16 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
My experience with Fedora has involved working and collaborating with the community at both national and international levels, encouraging people of all ages to use and contribute to Fedora. I have worked closely with several countries to help support their growth, maintain community engagement, and motivate contributors to continue participating in the Fedora Project.
My main motivation, and what has always kept me connected to the Fedora community, is contribution, networking, and the friendships I have built within it. Beyond that, I truly value being able to continue motivating more people to stay involved in the project.
In my opinion, this is one of the most challenging parts of being a contributor: helping more users and engineers become interested in contributing and encouraging them to continue participating in some way within the Fedora Project.
To improve the visibility and awareness of the committee, we should continue working on the plans that are already in progress, because these are not tasks that can be completed in a single day. These initiatives require time to mature in order to improve processes that benefit contributors and the community. The goal is not to make processes more complex, but to improve them so they remain effective and practical for collaborators. This takes time, in addition to the many other responsibilities we manage on a daily basis.
I believe that the area requiring the most attention is related to events and budgeting. We have had tickets and requests that did not move forward because either the requirements process was not fully understood or the process itself was not completed properly. We should be more open and supportive in this area, especially regarding swag and other resources for smaller events organized in different countries around the world.
The post F44 Mindshare Elections: Interview with Luis Bazan (lbazan) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:42:06 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I’ve been an active Fedora contributor for over 12 years, co‑maintaining the Python and 3D‑printing stacks and sponsoring new packagers.
I served on FESCo for 5 years and I’ve been on the Council for 1 year. Technically I am on the Fedora Packaging Committee as well, but I am not very active there nowadays.
Through those roles I’ve gained understanding of how Fedora is built and governed. I wish to keep that experience in the Fedora Council and ensure that the people who do the day‑to‑day work of creating Fedora Linux have a strong, informed voice at the table.
I spent my first year on the Council mostly orienting myself and I am not very satisfied with my accomplishments (or lack thereof).
I was contemplating whether to not run again or to try harder. As you are reading this interview, it means I decided for the latter 
My overall feeling after spending a year in this role is that there is this abyss between the Council and all the folks doing all things Fedora, like packaging. On one hand, we speak about initiatives, visions, and goals. On the other hand, there is Fedora Linux and people who make it. And I don’t feel like one hand knows what the other hand is doing. This has been frustrating to me and I decided to try to bridge that gap. I don’t have a ready-made solution for this yet, but it’s something that I strongly believe needs to be addressed and reflected in what Council is doing, approving, proposing.
Related to this, I feel that there is a more general risk of fragmentation of the community. For example, we seem to have moved some communication to discussion.fedoraproject.org while we kept others on the mailing lists. This move was a great opportunity to get more people involved in project discussions. At the same time, we risk losing the existing contributors. In the end, it seems we have two almost distinct groups of people who don’t talk to each other much.
No matter how many new contributors we get, we should not lose the existing ones, who are driving the project.
It was actually 3D printing.
Back in the day, we had a lab at the university with 1 (one) Prusa Mendel in it and I wanted to package some 3D printing apps like Skeinforge, Slic3r or Printrun for Fedora. I attended an RPM packaging workshop in the Brno Red Hat office and started packaging.
Not long after that I became a Fedora Ambassador, bringing the 3D printer to the Fedora booth at conferences.
The post F44 Council Elections: Interview with Miro Hrončok (churchyard) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:41:15 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
In previous years, I was a member of FESCo, where I gained exposure to the governance of the technical side of the Fedora Project.
In my professional life, I currently serve in a leadership role as Product Owner of the Community Linux Engineering team at Red Hat. Our team is responsible for a wide range of areas across the Fedora Project, including Quality Engineering, EPEL, Design, Infrastructure, and Release Engineering.
This gives me a unique perspective that combines community experience, technical understanding, and insight into how Fedora is supported inside Red Hat.
Immutable Desktop
Fedora is well positioned for the shift toward immutable and image-based operating systems. Projects like Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite already provide atomic updates and rollback capabilities while maintaining a strong developer experience.
Cloud-Native and Edge Computing
With Fedora CoreOS and Fedora IoT, Fedora already has strong foundations for container-focused and edge deployments. As these technologies continue to grow, Fedora can remain one of the leading platforms for modern infrastructure.
The Open AI Workstation
Developers increasingly want reliable environments for running local AI workloads and experimenting with open models. Fedora has an opportunity to become the preferred Linux workstation for this use case through strong hardware enablement, modern tooling, and fast adoption of new technologies.
Early Technology Adoption
Fedora has built a reputation for bringing important new technologies to Linux users early, whether that was systemd, Wayland, PipeWire, or Btrfs. That culture of innovation continues to attract developers and contributors who want to help shape the future of Linux.
Balancing Community and Corporate Influence
Fedora benefits enormously from Red Hat sponsorship, engineering support, and infrastructure. At the same time, maintaining community trust and independence remains critically important. Long-term success depends on keeping a healthy balance between corporate priorities and the Fedora community ethos.
Project Fragmentation
Fedora continues to grow across Spins, Labs, Editions, Atomic variants, and now containers. Growth is healthy, but it also increases the complexity of maintaining consistent quality, direction, and contributor focus across the project.
User Experience vs. FOSS Purity
Fedora’s commitment to free and open-source software is one of its greatest strengths. However, hardware enablement and multimedia support can still be frustrating for many users. Fedora should continue improving the onboarding experience without compromising its principles.
Competition
The Linux ecosystem is moving quickly. Arch Linux attracts many advanced users, Ubuntu remains dominant in commercial environments, and NixOS is gaining momentum among developers interested in reproducible systems and declarative infrastructure. Fedora needs to continue innovating while preserving the strengths that make the project unique.
As a user, I was basically forced by my older brother to use Fedora Core 1-3 on our shared family computer.
After a few years of distro hopping, I eventually returned to Fedora because it consistently provided modern software without requiring the amount of maintenance that distributions like Arch Linux demanded at the time.
After years of using Fedora, I wanted to give something back to the community. I started contributing through packaging and co-maintaining several Node.js and Ruby packages.
Later, I had the opportunity to join the Fedora Project professionally as part of the Release Engineering team. Over time, I transitioned into my current role as Product Owner for the team supporting Fedora inside Red Hat.
Today, I have visibility into how work is prioritized across the teams that provide Fedora infrastructure and services, support release engineering and quality processes, and contribute to areas like EPEL, Docs, and Design.
This brings me to the current Council elections. I believe Fedora is at an important crossroads. The project continues to grow, but at the same time, the distribution and contributor experience are becoming increasingly fragmented across Spins, Labs, Atomic variants, containers, and specialized deliverables.
I believe Fedora’s biggest challenge over the next few years will not be innovation. Fedora has always been good at innovation. The real challenge will be maintaining a clear identity, a healthy contributor community, and a coherent user experience while continuing to grow.
The post F44 Council Elections: Interview with Tomáš Hrčka (humaton, jednorozec) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:40:43 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I have served as a member of FESCo for six terms since I joined the project, and have also been a member of the Packaging Committee for over eight years now. In these roles (among others) I have gathered experience in a variety of both technical and non-technical areas including problem resolution, technical discussions, project management, technical writing / documentation, organizing meetings, etc.
I think it will be increasingly important to keep the balance between what makes Fedora successful and things that end up being costly distractions – to continue integrating new technologies into a modern, but stable distribution, while avoiding adoption of dead-end or unsustainable technologies from the current hype cycle.
Fedora is where my distro-hopping days unexpectedly ended a little over a decade ago. It has felt like home since.
The post F44 Council Elections: Interview with Fabio Valentini (decathorpe) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:39:43 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
For some time I was an admin of the Russian Fedora Remix services – maintained the site and the wiki. I also participated in moderation of some of our IRC, Jabber channels and forums, which gave me quite a lot of experience in dealing with the folks which are not necessarily IT experts and professionals.
I am also a proud survivor of the GNOME 3 and systemd debates there
Professionally I have worked as a support engineer, build/devops/CI engineer, team lead and product owner, which gives me a range of experience covering quite a lot of “non-coding but still engineering” topics. And I generally believe that there is a lot more in engineering than just writing code.
I also have been on the Fedora Council for some time now. I can not say I really know how to do this council thing correctly, but I am doing my best.
I believe that the general interest in Linux and Fedora in particular is on the rise, and we as a distribution currently are well placed to provide a lot of things people are looking for – stable base, variety of options, fast moving layers on top of integrated foundation and so on. It comes with the risk though as we just might spread too thin trying to cover all possible use cases, all the emerging technologies and all kinds of sometimes contradicting goals.
Our current project model, while open and community-driven, is still rather centralized.
As a big fan of the idea of federation, I believe that going forward we need to learn how to work with the wider ecosystem without necessarily pulling every connected piece into the same project hierarchy.
As a former Fedora Remix user myself, I see remixing(*) as one of the core ideas, which can help us turn a single distribution into a some sort of constellation of distributions. And while each remix may be managed by different groups and different rules, they still need to have a good collaborative relationship, a way to discuss and communicate changes, or to coordinate shared efforts. Of course they also need a way to communicate and share the load and costs.
(*) Here I use a word “remix” in the widest possible sense as in anything which uses Fedora content as a base, no matter what kind of content is added on top and what format of the deliverable is built from it.
Even though currently I work as a software engineer, I started to use Fedora not as a coder but as a user. I needed LaTeX to write my Master’s and PhD thesis, and at that time the support for LaTeX(with Cyrillics) was really only working on Linux. Big thanks to Tom (spot) Callaway who still packages texlive for Fedora.
So essentially I chose Linux (and Fedora) because it was the easiest thing for me to use.
Of course the name also did play a role. The more common Linux distribution choices in my community at the time were Gentoo or Slackware. People were talking how “Linux is about choice” and that sort of thing. But once I learned a bit more about the ideas behind different Linux distributions, I really got hooked on the concept of an integration, rather than customization.
The Upstream First principle in particular was rather eye-opening for me. The idea that you should not just build a system for your own needs – that is what the local folks were doing – but that you need to share and contribute those changes back, or at least to discuss them with the original developers to understand their thought process and the choices they made.
I always looked at my Fedora system not as a thing to tweak for my personal needs, but as a path to become a part of a larger community.
The post F44 Council Elections: Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:38:35 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
While I don’t have formal governance experience, I’m an active contributor to several teams and organizations focused on image-based systems. This is the very area where Fedora is leading innovation. This gives me both technical depth in Fedora’s modern directions and practical insight into how image-based approaches are being adopted across the ecosystem. Additionally, as an independent contributor, I bring a perspective focused on the broader community’s needs.
Fedora’s leadership in image-based systems is a significant opportunity. The Atomic Initiative is advancing this space meaningfully. However, when such initiatives conclude, we must ensure contributors remain engaged and their work integrates into sustainable community practices.
More broadly, as AI becomes increasingly present in development workflows, we need thoughtful governance around how Fedora engages with it. This is about authorship, accountability, and the moral questions around code provenance and community contribution. Fedora’s values should guide how we engage with these technologies responsibly.
I initially needed an OS for on-premise servers, which led me to CentOS. The transition forced a reassessment, and during that process, I discovered Fedora’s emerging work on image-based systems. That discovery led me to get involved in related teams, which deepened my commitment to this community. Now, as an active contributor in that space, what keeps me here is the community itself. I’m inspired by it, and that’s what drives my continued involvement.
The post F44 Council Elections: Interview with Hristo Mainov (hricky) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:37:56 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
While I could not make it to the Fedora Council through elections in the previous term, I was chosen as a Mindshare Representative from the second half of the term. Besides bringing the interests of the Mindshare Committee to the Fedora Council Strategy Summit 2025, I also worked on further progressing the Fedora Forge Community Initiative with my work on the private issues and Pagure Migrator. Staying true to my volunteer first community agenda, I also worked on the documentation for the Fedora Project Contribution Model to encourage empathetic interactions and managing expectations in our mostly volunteer driven community.
Following the elector concerns from the previous term, I explicitly reinforced just how important it was for us to leverage objective community health metrics over arbitrary conditions that I voiced during the foundational drafting of the Fedora Verified proposal. With my inclination towards process sustainability, I have often voted for deferring decisions until we have accounted for most (if not all) feedback. I have had a hands-on approach towards major proposals like Fedora Forge, Image Mode, FedoraCVE trademark and Fedora Verified, by spending roughly around ten hours per week simply reading through the Fedora Discussion threads.
Besides my direct involvement in the Fedora Council, I am also working as an infrastructure architect, working on various projects in the Fedora Infrastructure and leading the Fedora Badges Revamp Project while mentoring an Outreachy intern. Being elected into the Mindshare Committee has also allowed for me to lead the logistics of various Fedora Project in-person representations at APAC events like DevConf.IN 2026 and FOSSAsia 2026, all while curating and guiding Fedora Project community events across the world. In my past life (or roughly five years back in human years), I also led the Fedora Websites and Apps community initiative.
One of the first things that comes to my mind about risks for our community is decision transparency. The discussions [1] [2] around the AI Developer Desktop Proposal were a valuable learning experience as they showed how much community members care about understanding why we vote the way we do, not just what we voted for. I see an opportunity here for elected members to share their reasoning with their votes on a given proposal, so others can follow the thought process. After all, I would want to vote for someone who engages with what the community has to say and is willing to show their work, even through various disagreements.
To dive even deeper, we also risk alienating the community members by deciding on a certain proposal before it is theoretically ready to be discussed. While a stopgap opportunity here might be ratifying a proposal readiness guidelines document that the members could refer to, in my honest opinion, being active around the Fedora Project community platforms just ends up helping a lot more. If this requires us to spend more hours around the desk, have more frequently organized synchronous meetings, include more electable Fedora Council seats or set regular Fedora Council social hours – then it is something that we need to account for.
Beyond transparency, I also want to champion process sustainability in our established processes. The end of an elected member’s term should not mean that their ongoing work disappears – it should be (or made) possible for incoming candidates or continuing members to carry forward and iterate upon that work. Similarly, we can reduce the risk of potential burnouts among elected members by effectively delegating to the enthusiastic contributors that our community is never short of. Good governance should outlast any single term, and I want to actively work towards building that continuity through documenting better handoff practices.
Video games. Back in early 2020 when we were isolated at our homes due to COVID-19 pandemic, all I had was a weak laptop and a Fedora Workstation setup to keep me from boredom. One of my first contributions had been to the Quick Docs. When I thought I was done with my contributing activities, friends like Ankur Sinha, Alberto Sanchez, Justin Wheeler, Marie Nordin, Nasir Hussain, Vipul Siddharth etc. just made me keep coming back for more. Then getting inspired from all the amazing stuff they got up to back in the day made me want to see if I could be of some help – and a huge reason why I am keeping myself busy even today is just that.
The post F44 Council Elections: Interview with Akashdeep Dhar (t0xic0der) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:37:16 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
To strengthen my governance knowledge, I recently completed two courses on governance fundamentals. (Governance Training, and Tools for Project Planning)
I am also familiar with meeting procedures, including how meetings are structured, planned, run and how decisions are recorded. I participate in regular productive meetings with Fedora Infrastructure.
I’ve always been an active person, through cycling and competitive dancing, and even as a student, I’m always thinking about how I can make things better for others. Thus, my current governance experience comes from outside of the open-source world, however, it translates well to the Fedora Project.
I’m an elected member of my school’s board and a member of the school’s parliament. I’m familiar with what it means to represent a diverse community, balance viewpoints, and make consensus-driven decisions. In this role, I dealt with issues such as financial disbursement and conflicting student choice.
As an independent contributor, my focus is entirely on serving our community and listening to the communities voice. While I respect the fantastic work of those who came before me, I will bring independent perspective to the Council, guided by my ethical commitment to fully open-source software.
To me, software freedom is a digital right.
When looking at the landscape now, the single biggest risk facing Fedora right now is the rush to implement AI everywhere. This threatens not only a drop in quality of our codebases but also creates massive legal grey areas. The community is rightfully pushing back against this. Fedora must refuse to let this hype dictate our governance.
The opportunity for Fedora is to set the global standard for what a measured, ethical, and secure approach to AI tooling looks like. Instead of rushing to adopt external, proprietary black boxes, Fedora should take its time to define how open-source principles apply, prioritizing local execution, strict licensing compliance, and open-weight models. Fedora can champion true open-source principles in a changing landscape, proving that innovation does not require the sacrifice of security or ethics.
Our priority must always be human craftsmanship and infrastructure integrity; any tool we introduce must serve our contributors, not replace them.
My first introduction to Fedora happened on July 20, 2025, when I sent an introduction to the infrastructure mailing list. On May 21, 2026, I was sponsored to my first sysadmin group. That is what Fedora has done for me and what I can do for Fedora.
Before joining the project, I was a sysadmin working completely alone. Fedora gave me the space to learn how to function in a bigger team, how to navigate complex infrastructure, and how to collaborate effectively.
My trajectory shows I’m capable of learning, adapting, and integrating into complex systems at an exceptional pace. I’ve gone from a newcomer to an active contributor, not only in the infrastructure team but also in Fedora Data Working Group, where I’m helping Hatlas come to life, and in the Join team, where I help new contributors find their footing.
Fedora has helped me scale up my skills rapidly, and I am running for council to ensure Fedora remains just as dynamic, rock-solid, and welcoming for everybody else.
The post F44 Council Elections: Interview with Vít Smolík (smoliicek) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:07:58 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I have contributed to many areas of the project since I joined it over a decade ago, so I think I can bring a broad perspective to FESCo. I want to help insure the project’s continued success happens in a sustainable way.
I am the most active package maintainer in Fedora (by count of updates / builds), primarily because I am the main point of contact for most Rust packages. My work includes package updates, package review, triaging build failures and broken dependencies, and pruning packages for obsolete, outdated, or unused Rust crates from Fedora. I regularly contribute to upstream projects through bug reports and pull requests to fix issues that are discovered downstream in Fedora. Additionally, I triage, report, and attempt to fix upgrade path issues caused by missing package updates every release cycle.
Many disagreements I’ve handled were only concerned with details, while the goals of everyone involved were still aligned. So I try to find common ground and / or explore alternative or creative solutions that can work for everyone involved.
I am – in general – wary of becoming dependent on products from companies that are nowhere near profitable and only kept afloat by a combination of inconceivably large amounts of venture capital and “creative” investment arrangements. Additionally, to me these “AI” systems aren’t “just tools” and can’t be treated solely as such, especially due to externalities like unethical data scraping practices, copyright / license laundering, excessive power and water consumption, noise and greenhouse gas pollution, hardware shortages and price increases, etc. I have yet to see a competitive “AI” product that does not have these problems, and I am unsure whether creating one is even possible.
No pineapple, and definitely not on Pizza.
The post F44 FESCo Elections: Interview with Fabio Valentini (decathorpe) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:06:42 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
Conan Kudo is a common nickname for me)) (There’s quite a bit more, but I think that sort of covers it. )As a long-time member of the Fedora community as a user and a contributor, I have benefited from the excellent work of many FESCo members before me to ensure Fedora continues to evolve as an amazing platform for innovation. For the past few years, I have had the wonderful privilege of serving as a member of FESCo, and I enjoyed my time serving to steer Fedora into the future, and I wish to continue to contribute my expertise to help analyze and make good decisions on evolving the Fedora platform.
The bulk of my contributions to Fedora lately are on the desktop side of things, though I have gotten back into doing core stack stuff too. Most recently, I’ve worked within the KDE community to help develop Plasma Login Manager and Plasma Setup to further modernize the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition and enable it to fully participate in the Fedora Ready program. I have also been actively assisting our friends at various PC makers participating in the Fedora Ready program to better support Fedora as an operating system offering for their products. This has directly led to the Fedora community gaining a new Fedora Ready participant with Star Labs, who offers Fedora KDE on their products as an operating system option. There’s always more to come on that front, and I hope Fedora Ready will continue to grow. On the core stack side of things, I’ve recently ported PackageKit’s DNF backend to DNF5, which once again unifies Fedora’s package management stack for the first time in several releases. This unlocks the ability for us to freely leverage DNF5 features that do not have analogues in DNF4.
My hope is that the work I do helps with making the experience using and contributing to Fedora better than it was ever before and that Fedora’s technical leadership in open source draws in more users and contributors.
I attempt to explain my viewpoint and try to build consensus through persuasion and collaboration. If there isn’t a path to consensus as-is, I try to identify the points of disagreement and see if there is a way to compromise to resolve the disagreement. Generally, this ultimately results in a decision that FESCo can act on.
I am rather conflicted about “AI” technology, especially LLM-based generative AI (GenAI) technology. I worry that it wipes out the implicit fairness that we believe Free Software carries. The nature of this tooling and how people gain access to quality tools creates an unpleasant classist split of haves and have-nots based on affordability. As the costs to access and leverage LLM technology skyrocket, a new underlying elitism will implicitly develop since only gainfully employed affluent developers will have access to the best technology.
It is true that there are open models under OSI licenses that exist (IBM Granite and Google Gemma 4 are examples of these), and I know that it’s possible to create your own models leveraging open source technology. But to date, open models do not yet produce results as good as the frontier proprietary cloud models, and we now operate in a world where proprietary services tightly integrate these things together and make it very hard to ignore the result. Perhaps more focused development on open models leveraging open source technologies will change that, but given how expensive such endeavors are, I am a little skeptical. Or perhaps the lack of willingness by many AI practitioners to pursue that is what makes me skeptical.
Putting that all aside, I am skeptical of AI technology in large part of my experience as an open source software maintainer. The quality of contributions are significantly lower than unassisted ones thus far (here’s a notable example), and while I’m sure it is possible to leverage it effectively in a productive fashion, there is mounting evidence that our ability to learn and maintain cognitive skills are weakened by reliance on AI technology as it exists today. I would prefer to receive poorer contributions from people that were their own as an opportunity to help them grow, because that is the embodiment of human success.
In the end, I do not feel like it is a good idea for Fedora as a project to make AI a critical pillar, but supporting open source, well-integrated tooling for people to experiment with AI/ML in the environment of their choice and knowing the risks they take on in doing so is perfectly fine with me.
To me, the most important thing about Fedora is that we’re a community with a bias for innovation. Our community looks to solve problems and make solutions available as FOSS, and this is something that Fedora uniquely does when many others take the easy path to ship old software or nonfree software everywhere. We work with tens of thousands of projects to deliver an amazing platform in an easily accessible and open fashion, built on FOSS infrastructure and tools. This makes Fedora special to me, and we should continue to hold ourselves to that high standard.
I’m also a big believer in community bonds and collaboration, which is why people tend to find me all over the place. I’m involved in Asahi Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, and several other similar projects in leadership roles as well as a contributor in order to demonstrate my commitment to this philosophy.
The post F44 FESCo Elections: Interview with Neal Gompa (ngompa) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:03:57 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
In the past I’ve interacted with FESCo only through change proposals. Due to the nature of my work onimage-builder I’ve gathered quite a bit of knowledge and ideas (though never enough) about the whole of Fedora and how it is put together. I’d like to take part in the other side of things both to learn
more but also to apply what I have learned.
Personally I’m a big proponent of “building on Fedora”. By that I mean that we could and maybe should
make Fedora as generic as possible in the packaging department with few assumptions about how an eventual system is laid out. This would open the road for more technical variety in the various editions, spins, and
labs. Examples here (non-exhaustive) would be UKIs, systemd-boot, BTRFS boot-to-snapshot, and others.
Separately but interconnected is that I’d love it for Fedora to be the prime place people go to if they want
to build their own flavour of a distribution. Remix culture should be nurtured, documented, and made as easy as possible so that the ideas can be tried and tested outside of Fedora before making their way into Fedora.
Well, I take a super pragmatic approach to disagreements. Sometimes it’s just easier to bow out of a disagreement
than to continue it. Often times one person cares more about a given problem than another person and to me that
means it can be good to give in, expecting the same in return on a later issue that another person might care more
about.
This way fosters pretty strong ownership of problems and an environment where people trust eachother on problems
rather than going at eachother.
Super hard question. Since this is specifically about AI in software development most of it would probably concern what upstreams do. As long as they keep compatible licenses we won’t have much of a say in this.
As for the more general approach to ‘AI’ in software development I feel like we should promote open implementations as far as that’s possible. The AI/ML SIG has been doing a lot of work with ROCm and other open stacks to be able to run models on Fedora. The future is not servitude to big tech companies but hopefully running our own local models.
There’s probably more that can be done in outreach as ‘AI’ stacks can be notoriously hard to package, our expertise could be shared and it might be useful; but I don’t know if that should/would be a Fedora Project kind of thing.
Firstly, I want to disclose that I work at Red Hat as people do hold opinions about that so let’s have that out of the
way.
Other than that I want things to be open with the community deciding our direction. Generally I’m on the ‘conservative’
side as far as there is a conservative side in Fedora. I mean that in the sense that I think our current rules and guidelines concerning contribution and packaging are a decent starting point and we should not change them lightly.
We should also try to use as much as possible that what Fedora already offers. Many recent projects have been causing splits in infrastructure and community spirit. Let’s do less of that.
The post F44 FESCo Elections: Interview with Simon de Vlieger (supakeen) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:01:20 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I have been active in the Fedora community since almost the very beginning (see also the next question), and an elected member of FESCo since the F40 election cycle. Outside of committee work, I am an experienced packager for multiple programming language ecosystems and maintain tooling intended to improve packaging workflows.
The project is facing some interesting decisions at the moment, in terms of what we produce (which packages, in what formats, for which architectures), how we produce them (what build systems, how we do quality assurance, especially in the face of an avalanche of CVEs), and who our contributors, users, and downstreams are. It needs both experienced hands who knows how things are done and why, as well as familiarity with current industry practices.
I believe I bring both of these to the table. At my day job, I focus on upstream distribution work and integrating improvements into our production fleet, which informs the perspective I bring to my FESCo work. If reelected, I hope to continue contributing that perspective – and I hope I have demonstrated my ability to separate what is best for the project from what is best for my employer.
Apart from my FESCo membership, I am an active packager and a member of various packaging SIGs (Rust, Python, Golang). My day job revolves around a large CentOS Stream deployment, so I was a member of the Fedora EPEL Steering Committee, am an active member of the CentOS Hyperscale SIG, and co-founded the Proposed Updates SIG that is forked off to focus on producing timely updates for those who deploy CentOS Stream in production.
I maintain sandogasa, a set of tools and library crates to assist with Fedora and CentOS packaging workflows. They solve some unique needs (e.g. bootstrapping EPEL packages, both those needed at work and also those needed to run Fedora’s mailing list infrastructure), and sometimes provide up to date alternatives to previously-written utilities (e.g. sandogasa-hattrack can surface someone’s Fedora Discussions activity – a platform that was not around when fedora-active-user was written). As these tools mature I hope to see them adopted more as part of project workflows.
I have landed multiple change proposals in the past – most notably around Btrfs and systemd-oomd. Most recently, for the F43 cycle Neal Gompa and I worked on Wayland-only GNOME and for F44 cycle, I landed:
In my experience, disagreements are sometimes inevitable. While it is better to have consensus, sometimes that’s not possible, and it is important to recognize those situations and agree to disagree.
It is sometimes easier to understand each other’s positions in less formal situations – I am reminded of our Friends foundational value here. This is where having personal interactions with other community members really helps – we can disagree without taking things personally, or clear things up in a side channel because sometimes some reasons cannot be divulged in public.
In the end, we are all fallible humans, and we all have our own interests and preferences, both personal and work-driven. Being able to understand those we disagree with both make it easier to keep things civil and to find compromises.
I have a nuanced take on this, so this will likely rub some people the wrong way. I have strong ethical reservations about using (generative) AI, and legal reservations as well, but IANAL so I will not really cover the legal aspects here; I defer to all the legal counsels who have vetted the project’s AI policy and my employer’s legal counsel who must have OKed our AI usage…
There’s the issue of training data provenance – there’s the issue of regulations not catching up yet to either address copyright infringement issues, nor protecting workers from job displacement, nor regulating energy and water usage. I could go on. If you’re “lucky” enough to work on improving the AI itself, while I can’t speak to how that is done at my day job, suffice to say there are horror stories out there, at that company, affiliated companies, and competitors. There are concerns that inappropriate use of AI leads to cognitive decline.
Using AI in software development is, as a large project shipping mission critical software, sadly seems to be verging on inevitable these days – but I’d rather we use it defensively, like how curl uses AI scanners. Using it to help triage issues, like COPR’s Log Detective, is also promising.
We certainly could use some more resources when it comes to fixing CVEs and when it comes to tooling – there are simply not enough volunteers, sadly. Though – this comes up in Debian’s debate about AI usage too – we should be careful not to close off opportunities for new contributors because it’s easier to fix something with LLM assistance than to onboard someone to do it.
I will own up to writing sandogasa mostly with AI assistance. As part of that, I wrote up my personal LLM policy for those curious. As the org name (slopfest) suggests, my colleague and I who have repos there feel conflicted about the use of LLMs; we try to limit it to this GitHub organization, and to tasks that are repetitive and error-prone anyway. Just as artifacts produced by GNU autotools do not need to be GPL licensed, hopefully you can use these tools free of any LLM taint.
Finally, the elephant in the room – the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative, that intends to make it easier to install hardware drivers and development libraries needed to leverage GPUs, including, controversially, the proprietary NVIDIA stack. NVIDIA is worth over USD 5tn. IBM is valued at just over USD 200bn. I think NVIDIA can hire enough people with packaging experience to solve the problems they themselves cause by not open sourcing key headers people want to compile against – and I know they do employ people who know packaging. I think one role distributions like Fedora can do, and large NVIDIA customers especially among the hyperscalers, is to have a common position to negotiate with NVIDIA. If that happens then we might have enough traction to end up with positive outcomes.
Without pushing back against the tide of AI boosterism, I fear that the reputational damage because this is seen to be a top-down initiative would outweigh any benefit – and I still think this could have been a remix and Council was involved unnecessarily early. We used to be perceived as caring strongly about licensing (it took us a long time to ship a subset of RPM Fusion, and Tom Callaway’s work is immortalized in the name of Fedora’s previous licensing system), and I really prefer that we’re not seen to be AI boosters, because a) it does not seem like the right thing to do IMHO and b) the crowd we will attract, and likewise, the existing contributors and userbase we will alienate.
I work for Meta – which runs CentOS Stream on millions of bare metal servers and in containers. I hope I have demonstrated over the past two years in FESCo, and over a longer period in my other Fedora and CentOS engagements, that I try to put the community first and not let my employer’s interest override my responsibility to the community.
I recently relocated to Ireland with my wife and kid – it’s a lovely country, and a fascinating bridge between the US we left and Europe, given the presence of US multinationals here and the history of Irish emigration. We are looking forward to attending more European open source conferences in the future once we are more settled in.
The post F44 FESCo Elections: Interview with Michel Lind (salimma) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 21:00:13 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I care a lot about Fedora, and I hope to bring a fresh voice to FESCo informed by my multiple years of active participation in Fedora development. I want Fedora to continue to excel as a Linux distribution and a FOSS community that is welcoming to new users and contributors and ideas. I value the Fedora Foundations and the long-term contributors that have built a great distribution and improved our upstreams and the FOSS community at large.
Additionally, I am interested in ensuring the day-to-day aspects of Fedora development run smoothly and continuing to improve the packager experience. I am closely watching upcoming changes to dist-git (and potentially bug-tracking) in Fedora. I am excited about these changes — this is a great opportunity to address warts with the existing systems — but it is crucial to ensure that the transition fully addresses the project’s needs.
I am part of the Golang and Python SIGs and the FPC and have worked a lot on Packaging Guidelines improvements and RPM automation (macros, generators, etc.). As a FESCo member, I would continue to guide workflow improvements in Go, Python, Ansible Collections, and beyond. We’ve made good strides, but we still have work to do, especially surrounding multi-build updates, mass rebuilds, security bugs, and license detection.
I run the Orphaned Packages Process and maintain the associated tooling. I am also a packager sponsor and have mentored a couple new Fedora contributors. I will continue keeping the Fedora package collection healthy and helping new people get involved in Fedora development as a member of FESCo.
I maintain the Ansible stack in Fedora which led me to work upstream on the Ansible Community Steering Committee and the release manager team.
One of my favorite parts of FOSS communities like Fedora is getting to work with so many passionate people from all over the world toward a shared goal. I think it’s important to keep this is mind when having disagreements. Disagreements happen, but we can always create room for respectful dialogue and compromise. In the end, we are all on the same team.
I am an AI skeptic and worry about AI’s impact on society, the environment, and human intellectual creation. But I understand that various industries, including ours, are (attempting to) adopt AI-based tools. Just recently, I reviewed a set of AI-assisted contributions to a Fedora package. I am still trying to balance these conflicting notions. I am willing to support AI experimentation based on free/open technologies in Fedora as long as our project’s principles and policies are followed and the community is on board.
The post F44 FESCo Elections: Interview Maxwell G (gotmax23) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 20:53:24 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I am a long time Fedora user and contributor, with my first contribution dating back to 2008. Having previously served as a member of FESCo from 2015 to 2018, I understand the gravity and operational realities of this committee. My foundational engineering roots in the project include serving in SysAdmin Main within the Fedora Infrastructure Team and working as a member of the Fedora Release Engineering Team, where I contributed to our core build tooling, container infrastructure, and Project Atomic. Additionally, I spent roughly a decade upstream as a member of the Ansible Core Engineering Team, driving various Fedora focused integration efforts.
In recent years, my engineering focus has centered squarely on the AI infrastructure space. I currently serve as the Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Chair for the Linux Foundation AI & Data, and I am a core maintainer of the OpenShell Agentic Security & Governance project.
What I hope to bring to FESCo this time around is a pragmatic, deeply experienced perspective on how we can responsibly bring AI technologies into both the inner workings of Fedora as a project, and into the deliverable artifacts we release to our users. My goal is to ensure this transition happens safely, securely, and in absolute alignment with the open source way.
I have recently re-engaged my hands on contributions, focusing primarily on AI related projects and working to scale my contribution footprint back to my historic levels. Even with a multi year hiatus, my historical contributions still ranks me in the top 50 of all contributors in the Fedora Badge System. Over my career, I have contributed to more than 200 open source projects, many of which remain packaged and shipped in Fedora today. My current work aims to ensure Fedora stays ahead of the curve as the landscape shifts toward AI native software stacks.
I always aim to find consensus through collaborative discussion, transparency, and healthy, respectful debate. I believe a steering committee’s job is to weigh technical merits and community impact objectively. However, if a consensus cannot be reached and a majority vote is taken, I fully practice the principle of “disagree and commit.” Even if a decision goes against my personal vote, I will actively support and work to successfully execute the majority decision to keep the project moving forward smoothly.
Fedora needs a pragmatic open source strategy to address AI’s disruptive impact on both the software development ecosystem and open source itself. We must establish clear, principles based guardrails around the ethical use, consumption, and application of AI within our project’s development pipelines, while continuously solidifying Fedora’s core principles of The Four Foundations, in a rapidly changing world. We should position Fedora not as a passive consumer of industry hype, but as the secure, foundational infrastructure that makes open source AI development possible.
When it comes to AI in software development, my position centers on two fronts:
I have been an open source contributor for more than 25 years. Professionally, I am a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat. In my open source community efforts, I serve as the TAC Chair of the LF AI & Data and am an active upstream core maintainer of OpenShell. I have previously had the distinct honor of serving the Fedora community on FESCo, and I would be incredibly grateful for the opportunity to bring my combined history in Fedora and my current expertise in AI systems back to the committee to help steer our next chapter.
The post F44 FESCo Elections: Interview with Adam Miller (maxamillion) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 12:36:17 UTC
You went above and beyond - Fedora Project would not be the same without you!
You attended the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026
This is a report created by CLE Team, which is a team containing community members working in various Fedora groups for example Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Quality etc. This team is also moving forward some initiatives inside Fedora project.
Week: 25 – 29 May 2026
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in Fedora infrastructure.
Ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream.
CentOS ticket tracker
CentOS Stream ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora releases.
It’s responsible for releases, retirement process of packages and package builds.
Ticket tracker
This is the summary of the work done regarding the RISC-V architecture in Fedora.
This team is taking care of quality of Fedora. Maintaining CI, organizing test days
and keeping an eye on overall quality of Fedora releases.
This team is working on introduction of https://forge.fedoraproject.org to Fedora
and migration of repositories from pagure.io.
This team is working on keeping Epel running and helping package things.
This team is working on improving User experience. Providing artwork, user experience,
usability, and general design services to the Fedora project
If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #admin:fedoraproject.org channel on matrix.
The post Community Update – Week 22 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-29 08:00:00 UTC
A year ago, a family member gave me a 2019 laptop that wouldn’t run Windows anymore. And of course, I immediately installed Fedora Linux on it. While my day-to-day Fedora Linux system is a desktop PC, it’s nice to have a laptop to take with me when I do workshops or conference demos.
However, the laptop has a physical “spinning heads” hard disk, so it is really slow to boot. I timed it; the laptop takes almost two minutes to go from “power on” to “login prompt.” And that’s a very long time when you’re at the front of the room, waiting to start a demo.
I thought about replacing the hard disk with a solid state drive, but when I opened the laptop to make sure the drive was replaceable, I saw that the laptop also supports an NVMe solid state drive in addition to the hard disk.
This presented an interesting opportunity: I could put in an NVMe drive and install Fedora Linux across two disks. Specifically, I wanted to boot Fedora Linux from the NVME drive, and keep extra apps and other data on the hard disk. I use several big third-party apps for my demos, which I install in both /opt and /usr/local, and it’s a huge pain to download and install those extra applications whenever I upgrade Fedora Linux. (I prefer to wipe and reinstall when I upgrade Fedora Linux, so I always have a clean starting point.) If I could keep /opt and /usr/local on the hard disk, I could preserve those when I install the next version of Fedora Linux.
After installing a new NVMe drive in the laptop, I needed to reinstall Fedora Linux. I prefer the Xfce desktop, so I downloaded the Fedora Xfce spin and booted the installer. When the installer reached the “Destination” step, it prompted me for the target disk. I clicked “Choose destination” and selected the NVMe disk:
The rest of the installation ran normally. The Fedora Linux installer set up the partitions automatically on the new NVMe drive, encrypted my data, and installed the operating system.
With Fedora Linux on the NVMe drive, booting took seconds instead of minutes. Again, I timed it: about 20 seconds to go from “power on” to “login prompt.” That’s a huge improvement!
The disk partition app in the Fedora Xfce is GParted, which makes it easy to set up the hard disk with new partitions. However, GParted’s main limitation is that it can’t set up encrypted volumes for you. If you want to use encryption, you’ll need to use the command line and run cryptsetup on your own.
However, I’m not very concerned about encrypting my /opt and /usr/local partitions. These are just third-party apps, not private data. My personal data will be saved to my home directory, which is safely encrypted on the NVMe drive. So I decided to set up regular partitions, formatted as ext4 filesystems.
I used GParted to delete the old partitions on the hard disk, and define three partitions that were each about 300 GB: /opt (which I labeled as opt), /usr/local (labeled usrlocal) and /backup (labeled backup). GParted created the partitions and wrote an ext4 filesystem on each.
However, the /usr/local filesystem has a directory tree in it already, such as /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib, although these directories will be empty after installing Fedora Linux. I wanted to copy the original directories to the new filesystem. The easiest way to do that is to add the new usrlocal partition somewhere else and then copy the old /usr/local to the new partition. Adding a partition to a directory is called mounting, and the directory itself is called a mount point.
First, I needed to create a new mount point for the usrlocal partition, which can be located anywhere on the filesystem. Since this was temporary, I created it under /tmp then mounted the new partition using the mount command:
$ sudo mkdir /tmp/usrlocal $ sudo mount LABEL=usrlocal /tmp/usrlocal
Then I copied the contents of the old /usr/local to the new /tmp/usrlocal mount point. The -a or –archive option copies everything:
$ cd /usr/local $ sudo cp --archive * /tmp/usrlocal
After the process is complete, I unmounted the new partition:
$ sudo umount /tmp/usrlocal
To make sure the new partitions are automatically mounted every time my laptop reboots, I needed to add them to my /etc/fstab file. This is a special file that contains the filesystem table, which is a list of partitions that the system can find on the disk and where to mount them. For example, my default /etc/fstab file looks like this:
# # /etc/fstab # Created by anaconda on Sat May 23 20:15:13 2026 # # Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk/'. # See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info. # # After editing this file, run 'systemctl daemon-reload' to update systemd # units generated from this file. # UUID=c10ec138-be4b-4513-89b7-749ef4a0605e / btrfs subvol=root,compress=zstd:1,x-systemd.device-timeout=0 0 0 UUID=a87b1ed4-4951-4da1-a4a4-a5c48f1f3b28 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=9AD9-2C52 /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2 UUID=c10ec138-be4b-4513-89b7-749ef4a0605e /home btrfs subvol=home,compress=zstd:1,x-systemd.device-timeout=0 0 0
Each line in the /etc/fstab file is divided into several fields: the identifier for the filesystem (to learn more about these, see Persistent Identifiers for Storage Devices in the Fedora online documentation), the mount point, the filesystem type, a list of mount options, and two optional fields that control if backup software should “dump” the filesystem to backup media (use 0 for never) and what order the fsck command should check filesystems when needed (usually 1 for the root filesystem, or 2 for other filesystems). I added these lines to my /etc/fstab file, which defined the mount points for each of my new filesystems:
LABEL=backup /backup ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2 LABEL=opt /opt ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2 LABEL=usrlocal /usr/local ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
This is an internal drive, so it should be there every time the laptop boots up. If you add removable storage to the /etc/fstab file, such as a USB drive, you should add the nofail option to this list of mount options. Otherwise, if the partition is not available when Linux starts up, the system will hang.
With these lines in the /etc/fstab file, I ran these commands to reload the /etc/fstab file, create the /backup mount point, and mount each of the filesystems:
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload $ sudo mkdir /backup $ sudo mount /backup $ sudo mount /opt $ sudo mount /usr/local
This generated an SELinux alert right away, complaining that the new /usr/local filesystem lacked the correct security context. The security information wasn’t “carried over” when copying the old /usr/local directory tree. Fortunately, the SELinux error provides the solution:
To restore the default SELinux security contexts to the new /usr/local directory tree, I ran the restorecon command. The -v option will print what it does to fix the system:
$ sudo restorecon -v /usr/local
Relabeled /usr/local from system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 to system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0
Relabeled /usr/local/lost+found from system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 to system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0
With just a few extra steps, I was able to use two disks with Fedora Linux, which lets me take full advantage of the storage on my laptop. The operating system now runs from the very fast NVMe drive, while my big third-party applications in /usr/local and /opt run from the hard disk.
On the weekend of April 25th/26th 2026, the 20th Linux Session was held in Wrocław, 
Poland. The Session is one of the oldest and biggest FLOSS-focused conferences in Poland. The event was organized by Akademickie Stowarzyszenie Informatyczne (Academic Informatics Association) at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology.
This edition spanned over two days of the weekend, starting early Saturday at 09:00 and ending on Sunday at approx. 17:00. The schedule contained 16 talks on the main track, as well as 4 extra talks on a Python side-track and 3 workshop sessions, plus a round of lightning talks right before the closing ceremony.
The Fedora Project was one of the sponsors of this year’s edition, providing some branded cups — which were given out as prizes for asking good questions in after-talk Q&A — as well as a catering budget.
The Fedora community was represented by Dominik Mierzejewski and Artur Frenszek-Iwicki. Dominik held a workshop session where he talked about video acceleration on Linux and helped the attendees set up their systems to make best use of their hardware.
“It’s actually weird. 10 years ago I’d have a lot to do, but now, people come over to the workshop and it turns out everything just works.” — Dominik
One of this year’s sponsors, Korbank, ran a contest where the attendees could try their best at assembling a rack server: inserting the power supplies, disks, memory and the CPU. The whiteboard tracking the scores revealed a truly fierce competition: while the first contestants barely made it under 2 minutes, the final winner finished well below 50 seconds!
There was also a community stall ran by the Coreforge Foundation, showcasing their progress in developing open hardware RISC-V CPUs. Pictured above is an FPGA programmed to run one of the foundation’s RISC-V cores.
No community meetup can be complete without a big bunch of stickers to share and give away — and this event was no different, featuring two tables full of stickers, posters and postcards, generously provided by the Free Software Foundation Europe and the NGI Zero fund.
The post Fedora at 20th Linux Session appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-22 10:00:00 UTC
This is a report created by CLE Team, which is a team containing community members working in various Fedora groups for example Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Quality etc. This team is also moving forward some initiatives inside Fedora project.
Week: 18 – 22 May 2026
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in Fedora infrastructure.
Ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream.
CentOS ticket tracker
CentOS Stream ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora releases.
It’s responsible for releases, retirement process of packages and package builds.
Ticket tracker
This is the summary of the work done regarding the RISC-V architecture in Fedora.
This team is taking care of quality of Fedora. Maintaining CI, organizing test days
and keeping an eye on overall quality of Fedora releases.
This team is working on introduction of https://forge.fedoraproject.org to Fedora
and migration of repositories from pagure.io.
This team is working on keeping Epel running and helping package things.
If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #admin:fedoraproject.org channel on matrix.
The post Community Update – Week 21 2026 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-21 08:17:17 UTC
Our remarkable Fedora ambassador, CentOS, and associate crews delivered live face-to-face support and outreach via our Fedora and CentOS @ SCALE 23x Linux Conference.
This reports the activities of the following Ambassadors / CentOS / Red Hatters / associates at the SCALE 23x Linux event:
The SCALE (The Southern CAlifornia Linux Expo) 23x community Linux event encompasses the 23rd Linux and related technology event with four days of exhibits, tutorials, and demos. This year’s SCALE happened in Pasadena (Los Angeles) area.
SCALE attracted about 3,000 worldwide guests to discuss Linux, AI, DevOps, security, free and open-source software, and more. Technical Committee (Online Services) Chairperson, Mr. Phil Dibowitz, and Network & Wifi Chairperson, Robert Hernandez, among many other community volunteers paved the way for a smooth registration.
Our Fedora Community Architect @jflory7 curated and arranged delivery of key swag and marketing items to Perry Rivera. Items included: commuter mugs, buttons, pens, stickers, badge lanyards, and more.
Ahead of our event, Fedora Contributor @chris furnished our attendees an amazing SCALE 23x Attendee badge. 58 attendees claimed the badge this year; cheers to @bcotton for being the first earner!
Fedora Ambassador @vwbusguy helped retrieve half of the items needed for the expo for next-day delivery.
Red Hatter and Fedora Ambassador @lajuggler later that evening delivered expo items.
@lajuggler finalized Fedora setup on 2 laptops.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew commuted and checked in.
@lajuggler attended an early morning Meshtastic workshop.
Ambassadors arrived to the expo floor to pre-setup booth tables and banners.
After @lajuggler ‘s workshop, he arrived later to the expo floor to join pre-setup and unpack swag, easel and markers, and a Fedora retromodem demo.
The crew assembled to present Fedora Hatch Day.
A set of us departed for lunch so we could make ready for opening the Expo floor later that day. @lajuggler and @carlwgeorge set up live demos on both systems for guests to use.
Like to set this up? Get started with a presentation from @lajuggler here.
Later that evening, we had dinner at El Portal. Moreover, Rob McBryde organized a stellar Karaoke night event at Barney’s Beanery.
Next, Our crew re-assembled in the expo hall to continue meeting and discussing with community. Later that evening, we had dinner and then converged on Game Night.
Once again, our crew gathered in the convention hall to continue our demos and greets with community. Later that afternoon, the crew packed up and closed the booth.
| Takeaway | Relevance to Our Work |
| Encourages communication with others | Encourages community |
| Relatively low cost to get started. Does not require a license | Minimal barrier to entry |
| Open-source | Encourages open-source activities |
| Physical component and light building assembly | Fairly easy to get started to communicate right away |
| Takeaway | Relevance to Our Work |
| Guests drawn by retro and novelty aspects of the retromodem and coolretroterm | Guests not normally interested in Fedora were happy to download a free PDF to learn how to build a similar setup at home with Fedora. |
| There was the concern that 9600 bps max would be too slow for guests, but people seemed perfectly fine with text whizzing by onscreen relatively quickly | Conversations would dovetail discussions in the CentOS side of the booth and vice-versa. This synergy brought in various guests and their associates for various reasons, encouraging the community aspect. |
| Takeaway | Relevance to Our Work |
| Learned that there are Sysinternals tools available for Linux | These tools which are handy on the Windows side could potentially be useful on the Linux side for Red Hat and Fedora usage. |
| Discussed the growing risk of LLM | Brought attention to Anthropic article and encouraged review of code base for 0-days. |
| Takeaway | Relevance to Our Work |
| Realization that code was sometime transferred on small or large reels | Appreciation for mass storage media and streamlined Internet delivery |
| Open source movement fought for eliminating charging of data transfer from site to site | The world might be vastly different if charged for each data transfer |
| Programmers had to punch their own punchcards | Dispel myth that someone else punched programmer card |
Throughout the expo, our booth had a sign-in sheet where visitors could optionally leave feedback about Fedora and related efforts.
From the data reviewed, we collected key findings:
| Most Recent Version of Fedora Used | Current Version (At the Time of this Blog’s Publication) | How many? |
| 43 | 43 | 4 |
| 41 | 43 | 1 |
| 44 beta | 43 | 5 |
| RHEL9 + Fed 45 (?) | RHEL10, 43 | 1 |
”
We had a fantastic turnout of about 3,000 Linux guests and a stellar Fedora Hatch Day.
A huge thank you to:
See you at the next one!
The post Fedora and CentOS @ SCALE 23x 2026 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2026-05-20 08:00:00 UTC
Introduction Earlier this year, the community was invited to share their thoughts on a potential new initiative called “Fedora Verified“. The goal of this survey was not to make final decisions, but to listen – to understand what contributors value, where opinions differ, and what questions still need answering.
Note: Fedora Verified is still a conceptual idea under discussion by the Fedora Council. Nothing has been finalized. The Council plans to continue these conversations with the community in the coming months, including at Flock.
The survey received 90 fully completed responses from contributors across the Fedora community. We focused our analysis exclusively on these full responses to ensure we are looking at complete, thoughtful feedback.
Key Takeaways – When we looked at the data, a few incredibly clear themes emerged regarding what contributors want this program to look like if it moves forward:
The results also reveal two interesting and contrasting groups within the community regarding governance of the program.
A notable portion of contributors expressed a desire for more rigidity, wanting clearly defined milestones (43%) and formal committee reviews. At the same time, a similarly sizable group preferred less structure, with 62% asking for a moderately or lightly structured path, feeling that too much formality could discourage participation.
This tension was one of the most valuable findings of the survey. It shows that the Fedora Verified concept touches on something the community feels strongly about in different directions. Both perspectives are valid – setting clear expectations while leaving room for diverse contribution styles. The Council must achieve a careful balance as it moves forward.
These findings are being shared with the Fedora Council and relevant SIGs to inform future community conversations. The full analysis report, including a detailed breakdown of all survey responses, is available here: “Analysis Report.”
If you have thoughts or feedback on these findings, we’d love to hear from you on “Fedora Discussion.”
jflory7 )
on 2026-05-19 08:00:00 UTC
I attended Red Hat Summit 2026 in Atlanta last week from May 11-13. As always, the keynotes and product announcements were interesting, but the real value of the event happened in the "hallway track." The 1:1 conversations over coffee or meals provide the blunt truth about how people actually feel, especially regarding heated community topics like the proposed Fedora AI Developer Desktop.
Over breakfast one morning, I asked three different people a simple question. If you could change one thing about Fedora governance or the project right now, what would it be? I received three entirely different answers. While this question was not specifically about the Fedora AI Developer Desktop, it provided an opportunity to hear governance grievances and think aloud together about what fixing these things may look like. With the spirit of collaboration and transparency in mind and respecting the Chatham House Rule, I want to share those concerns and what I believe they mean for our immediate future.
The first piece of feedback came from a community member who expressed deep exhaustion over the recent Fedora AI Developer Desktop proposal. They highlighted a structural imbalance: the feeling that all appointed roles on the Fedora Council wield too much executive authority, leaving elected Council representatives feeling powerless to stand up against what may appear like thorny, political pushes.
This is not just an abstract fear. I heard from past and present Council members who privately expressed reservations about a proposal, yet felt immense pressure to vote "yes" publicly. A strong desire for unanimous consent inadvertently coerces people into agreement, even when core concerns remain unaddressed.
This dynamic is part of why I cast a -1 vote on the Fedora AI Developer Desktop initiative, even after having initially voted +1 in favor.
I did not take the decision to change my vote lightly, but the fact that I changed my vote to pump the brakes validates the feedback I have heard informally.
If you look at the Fedora Council charter, we operate on a consensus decision-making model designed to foster collaboration and seek agreement.
A -1 vote does not act as a hostile veto or a permanent denial.
By definition, it is a mechanism that "immediately halts the process and requires discussion."
It triggers a mandatory cooling-off period.
When we move too fast, risking the alienation of our core engineering and kernel experts, we must utilize the tools our charter gives us to buy time, address specific concerns, and ensure actual, rather than theatrical, consensus.
Burning bridges in any community is far easier than rebuilding them.
Perhaps there is room to evolve the Fedora Council governance and decision-making model to leave more room for non-blocking dissent. There is definitely room to consider how the Fedora Council invites community feedback into difficult conversations, in a way that feels like we are listening instead of dictating.
The second insight came from a long-time Fedora contributor. This contributor participates in Fedora as part of their job, but their heart always prioritizes the community. The feedback was simple: our overall messaging is muddled, and we fail to tell a coherent story about what we produce. This was not specific to any individual output or deliverable, such as the Fedora AI Developer Desktop, but rather as a whole in terms of how we promote what Fedora is and is not.
This symptom points to a larger issue: we currently lack a cohesive, strategic vision. We build more deliverables than ever, yet new users find it increasingly confusing to know where to begin. It reminds me of the pre-2014 era of Fedora, before Matthew Miller led the Fedora.next strategy. Back then, it felt like the message about what Fedora Linux was unclear. We had several downloads available, all promoted equally. It was confusing for end-users about where to start consuming Fedora, and which things were more polished and which things were more experimental. So, the creation of Fedora Editions gave us a crisp, defined story about our work and impact. It provided the narrative and structure to better explain the most critical, most important parts of what we produce as a community. Today, in 2026, perhaps we find ourselves lost in the weeds again.
Since coming into the role last year, the current Fedora Project Leader, Jef Spaleta, has spent a lot of time thinking about vision. The world changed a lot in the last few years, and there are parts of Fedora which are struggling to keep up. The insight shared with me by the Fedora contributor in this section reminded me of the ideas that Jef has voiced about what a new vision for Fedora could look like. What comes after Fedora.next? I do not envy him because it is a huge challenge to address, yet it is critical for the future of the project. I believe that Jef has the makings of a vision that could rally the community for the next decade of our work. Perhaps we, as Fedora Council, could help rally around the ideas for a new vision and surface this in the community. As a member of the Fedora governance, I would be happy to work together with Jef and other Fedora community leaders to have the wider conversation.
In time, I hope we can address this insight shared by the Fedora contributor I spoke with. Ultimately, we cannot align on a strategy we have not yet read. I am optimistic that we will build something together with the community for the next decade of Fedora.
The final piece of feedback came from an EPEL maintainer with deep community roots. They expressed frustration over Red Hat using the Fedora trademark in major product announcements without clear community visibility.
Effective Fedora governance requires modernized trademark guidelines and a commitment to transparency. I propose creating a public trademark ledger. If a trademark authorization requires an embargo for a corporate announcement, we can accommodate that. It would be unwise for the future of Fedora to turn down opportunities to work together with partners on announcements that require this initial secrecy. However, any such embargo must carry a strict expiration date, after which we publish the authorization to the public ledger.
This brings us back to the Fedora AI Developer Desktop. We need clear branding boundaries, and we may already have the perfect tool for this: the Fedora Remix.
The Fedora AI Developer Desktop could be an excellent candidate for a new Fedora Remix. Whether it operates as a formal Community Initiative or not, the Fedora Remix model gives the team driving the work the liberty to take risks, try new ideas, and include necessary proprietary bits (like Nvidia CUDA) without forcing them to follow the strict, high bar of official Fedora deliverables right out of the gate. Taking this path prevents the alienation of our core contributor base while still allowing innovation to happen. If it succeeds and sustains a community, we can always formalize it later.
First, I am grateful for the candid, honest feedback given to me when I asked an open-ended question to these three community members. I emphasized each person to be honest and to think big, if they could really change anything but only a single thing. I admired the thoughtfulness each person gave to their answer, even if we all acknowledged most of these challenges did not have any "easy fix". This goes to say, Fedora remains strong because our contributors care enough to have these hard conversations. So, let’s use the tools we have (e.g., charter-driven cooling-off periods, transparent public visions, and the Remix model) to build a future that respects the Four Foundations that Fedora is built on.
admin )
on 2026-05-19 02:52:35 UTC
You went above and beyond - Fedora Project would not be the same without you!
This is a report created by CLE Team, which is a team containing community members working in various Fedora groups for example Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Quality etc. This team is also moving forward some initiatives inside Fedora project.
Week: 11 – 15 May 2026
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in Fedora infrastructure.
Ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream Infrastructure.
It’s responsible for services running in CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream.
CentOS ticket tracker
CentOS Stream ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora releases.
It’s responsible for releases, retirement process of packages and package builds.
Ticket tracker
This is the summary of the work done regarding the RISC-V architecture in Fedora.
This team is taking care of quality of Fedora. Maintaining CI, organizing test days
and keeping an eye on overall quality of Fedora releases.
This team is working on introduction of https://forge.fedoraproject.org to Fedora
and migration of repositories from pagure.io.
This team is working on keeping Epel running and helping package things.
This team is working on improving User experience. Providing artwork, user experience,
usability, and general design services to the Fedora project
If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #admin:fedoraproject.org channel on matrix.
The post Community Update – Week 20 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
