openSUSE @ LFNW - wrapup

Thank you to everyone who came out to LinuxFest Northwest 2016 April 23 and 24! The Geeko crew had a lot of fun in our newly-expanded openSUSE Lounge, where we were able to seat more than a dozen people and have some great conversations.

The conference overall drew nearly 2,000 open-source enthusiasts, setting yet another record for the event! All the openSUSE sessions were well attended, and that gave our team some excellent feedback for future sessions. We were pleasantly suprised to find that “Q&A with openSUSE board members (plus another guy)” (video) was a standing-room-only event, with the audience providing plenty of thoughtful questions for us to answer. “Make the Leap from Dev to Production with openSUSE Leap”, co-presented by Richard Brown and James Mason, provided a thoughtful developer-oriented talk to another full room. Richard also showed some cross-distribution love for openSUSE tooling, co-presenting “openQA - Avoiding Disasters of Biblical Proportions” with Fedora’s Adam Williamson.

Getting back to having a lot of fun, Bryan Lunduke organized a Geeko selfie contest, and we had dozens of tweets and posts of people showing Big Geeko some love, and taking home a little Geeko for their trouble. In the end, we picked our favorite, and gave away Big Geeko himself. Congrats to Alicia Williams on the win!

All of these great interactions, though, would be impossible without the openSUSE community! So, here is to you. A special thank you goes out to the volunteers who helped setup the lounge, and spent the whole LFNW weekend answering questions, discussing why they’ve chosen openSUSE, and of course, handing out lots of fun swag. Thank you Adrian, Bob, Caleb, and Carl for all your work, and we look forward to seeing everyone again next year!