From Yogyakarta to Prague: openSUSE.Asia Summit and Open Source Summit Europe 2026

This October I attended both the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Open Source Summit Europe 2026 in Prague, practically back to back. Two conferences, two continents and one very long trip.

Getting to both was quite an adventure. The way there was a train from Mikulov to Břeclav, another train to Vienna and on to Vienna airport, a flight via Qatar to Jakarta and one more flight to Yogyakarta. On the way back on Tuesday it was Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Qatar, Vienna, then a three hour stop at home in Mikulov before getting in a car and driving to Prague. All in all I spent at least 35 hours on planes, trains and cars. It was worth every hour, because the conversations I had at both events were priceless.

openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026, Yogyakarta

We had two amazing days of conference in Yogyakarta. A huge thank you goes to the organizers, including Edwin, Siska and the whole openSUSE Indonesia team, for putting together such a well organized event. I have always been met with great hospitality in Indonesia, and this year was no exception.

The opening ceremony

The summit started with a proper opening ceremony. After the Indonesian national anthem, dancers dressed like princesses gave a lovely traditional performance, carrying a golden chest. During the performance they presented each special guest with a leaf. The special guests were the hosting professor from the university and most of the European speakers, who were seated in the first row.

We do not really have this kind of ceremony at the beginning of events in Europe, and I think that is a pity. It set a warm and festive tone for the whole summit.

Community news

Congratulations to Dhenandi, the newly appointed leader of the openSUSE Indonesia community, whose appointment was announced during the event. We are looking forward to seeing the community grow under your leadership.

A special congratulations also goes to Siska on her return from maternity leave. Her little son was with us at the conference, and as Siska put it, he was the reason she had been away. Welcome back, and welcome to the youngest summit attendee!

Each day of the summit also had a quiz prepared by the Indonesian team, and honestly, it is far superior to our existing quiz.opensuse.org. It combined knowledge with agility. You had to tap on a moving lizard, swipe in the direction the lizard was rotating, or tap the button with the name of the color matching the displayed chameleon, while the text itself was written in a different color. :-) We hope we can adopt their quiz for our European events as well.

I managed to win first place on the first day, but on the second day I only made it to the top 20, because I am really bad at finger agility. :-))) Either way, it was huge fun for everyone. I gave my first prize, a mechanical keyboard, to the youngest attendee of the conference, Siska’s son.

It was also wonderful to see a group of roughly 30 women taking part in the summit. They were everywhere: among the organizers like Siska, among the many volunteers who kept the event running, and on stage as speakers, including Hamnah. Thank you all for making the summit what it was!

If you could not make it to Yogyakarta, the organizers put together highlight videos from both days of the summit.

Day one highlights

Day two highlights

Conversations that matter

I really appreciated the discussion with NevaCloud about communication and getting openSUSE Leap images published on their platform as early as possible. Having fresh Leap images available on day one at regional cloud providers makes a real difference for users in the region.

I also enjoyed meeting the BlankOn Linux team and showing them how to build custom images in the Open Build Service. That includes images based on dpkg, since KIWI supports them too. OBS is not only for RPM based distributions, and it was great to see their interest.

One talk I particularly enjoyed was about gaming. It led to a follow up hacking effort on a simple image that boots straight into Steam in fullscreen mode through gamescope. The image is based on my fork of the opensuse-oem-image in OBS.

It was amazing to finally meet so many people in person whom I usually only see online. James, Ayan (Himsec), Sunny, Simon from Australia and Edwin are all long time regulars at our openSUSE weekly meetings and in our virtual bar, so the summit was a super nice opportunity to finally see each other face to face. I spent pretty much every evening hacking on something with Himsec or having deep conversations, also with Siska and Hamnah.

A better time for our Tuesday weekly meeting

One big takeaway from those evening discussions is that our “Asia friendly” Tuesday weekly meeting was not so Asia friendly after all. Attending a meeting at 5pm Indonesian time, when most people are still at work or commuting home, is quite challenging.

As a result I have announced moving the meeting from 12:00 to 14:00 CEST, which is roughly 7pm in Indonesia. The first meeting in the new slot last Tuesday had more than 10 attendees, so it definitely works out. The feedback was that 8pm would be even better, so the meeting would not clash with dinner time. Something similar already works well in the other direction: the Thursday community meetup is at 9pm for Europeans, which is a cozy time to relax and have fun with others after work.

The current schedule of all our meetings is always available at calendar.opensuse.org.

Kudos takes off in Indonesia

One thing that made me really happy was the adoption of the openSUSE Kudos recognition platform by the openSUSE Indonesia community. People instantly started using it to thank each other, and it was great to watch the kudos flowing during the summit.

With the new teams feature, a few people also asked to join teams such as the openSUSE Board, the Election Officials or the openSUSE Release Team. The enthusiasm is very welcome, but a team in Kudos reflects work that is already happening, and joining one does not grant a role in the project. Many teams are open and you can simply join the ones you contribute to. Others have a process behind them. Board members are elected by the openSUSE members, Election Officials should be openSUSE members who want to help run the elections, and the Release Team grows out of work on the build and release pipeline.

To make this clearer, Kudos now supports invite only teams. Such teams do not accept join requests, and new members can only be added through an invitation from an existing member.

So please ask to join the teams you already contribute to. And if you would like to get involved with any of the teams above, reach out to them. They will be happy to help you get started.

Coffee, turtles and aquascaping

After the two days of conference, we went on an offsite trip, and it is something I will remember for a long time. We visited Sambisari Temple, an ancient Hindu temple that lay buried under volcanic ash for centuries before it was rediscovered. Then we headed to the beach and visited Kelompok Konservasi Penyu Mino Raharjo, a turtle conservation group at Pantai Goa Cemara, and released baby turtles from their sanctuary into the sea. It was a super nice ceremony, and watching the little turtles make their way into the waves was a beautiful way to close the summit. We wrapped up the day with a lovely seafood lunch at Rumah Makan Dapur Cemara, close to the turtle sanctuary.

Everybody there was very welcoming. While we were talking about coffee prices in Europe and the 2 EUR threshold for an espresso in Italy, the locals could not believe that people pay 2 EUR or more for a single coffee. A moment later I had a free coffee in front of me. That says a lot about the hospitality of the local people.

On the way back to the venue we made one more stop, at a workshop where we made our own scarves using the traditional batik technique. You simply apply wax to a template, and after dyeing, it turns into a beautiful blue scarf. Going home with a scarf you made yourself is pretty cool!

Indonesian coffee deserves its own paragraph. Every cup I had was of the highest standard, no matter if it was a small restaurant by the beach or a specialty coffee shop.

Aquascaping is my new private hobby, so of course I could not resist going on a little hunt for local aquascaping shops. Edwin picked me up in the middle of it and took me to a quick meetup with the local community at Hayati coffee. It was such a great place that I had to stop there more than once. :-)

Coffee at the summit itself was supplied by Kopi Toedjoeh, one of the event sponsors. I actually brought a few bags with me to Prague and gave them away at Open Source Summit Europe. People were super excited to get their hands on it!

Huge thanks to all the sponsors who made the summit possible.

LinuxDays 2026, Prague

I was sad that I could not make it to LinuxDays, which took place in Prague at the same time as the openSUSE.Asia Summit. The openSUSE booth crew led by Martin Pluskal did an excellent job there. Many thanks to Martin, Dan Čermák, Jan Baier, Avinesh Kumar, Martina Stuchlíková and everybody else who helped at LinuxDays.

Open Source Summit Europe 2026, Prague

openSUSE and SUSE have been a platinum sponsor of Open Source Summit Europe for many years, and this year we almost did not sponsor at all. I fought really hard to find the budget to make it happen, so I am very happy that we were there and that the booth turned out to be such a success.

The booth was led by Dan Čermák, who stepped up for the role long before I knew I would have a conflict with my trip back from Indonesia. Many thanks to Dan and to Martina Stuchlíková, who also took care of transporting all the booth material. I joined them from the second day on.

openSUSE on a 64 core RISC-V workstation

The highlight of the booth was Professor Pavel Píša from the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT). He brought a Milk-V Pioneer, a 64 core RISC-V board running openSUSE Tumbleweed, and used it to demonstrate QtRvSim, the RISC-V simulator developed by him and his students. The university uses the Open Build Service to build and publish QtRvSim, which made it a perfect showcase of our collaboration in the education sector. It also showed that RISC-V is capable of being a decent workstation today.

This demo brought many, many guests to the booth. We scanned a bit over 300 visitors, and the real number was possibly closer to 400. We simply spent a lot of time talking to people and less time scanning their badges. :-) Booths with less interaction might have been more successful at scanning, but the conversations we had with our visitors were amazing.

RISC-V was a big hit at the whole event. openEuler, which had one of the largest booths at the summit, showcased Tekken running on RISC-V. And from what we saw at our own booth, people are really interested in seeing powerful RISC-V hardware rather than yet another small single board computer.

People and connections

Among the visitors were people from N26 bank, with whom we talked about “European Linux”.

I was happy to connect David Heidelberg from the Czech and Slovak mobile Linux community with Adrian Campos Garrido, who works on openSUSE images for devices such as the PinePhone.

It was awesome to meet Mr. Müller from Bender Robotics, who uses openQA for their embedded testing. He showed us their instance and was looking for best practices for writing tests that do not need to be changed too often. I connected him with Oliver Kurz from our QA department and invited the team to our public QE sessions on Jitsi, which happen every Friday. You can find them at calendar.opensuse.org.

There were many other interested companies as well, like the OpenAtom Foundation, who sent their regards to our Dr. T (Thomas Di Giacomo), whom they had met at other events before.

I also got in touch with the SAP Open Source team and invited them to have a booth at the openSUSE Conference 2027, which I am organizing in Prague from 11 to 13 June 2027. It is hard to say SUSE and not think of SAP, and it would be great to give the SAP team a chance to showcase the open source projects they are working on to our community. We would love to see them there!

Visitors at the SUSE booth could also take part in our digital sovereignty quiz, and everyone who reached a good enough score went home with a chameleon plushie.

Looking ahead

I came back from Prague with a big backlog of new LinkedIn contacts and plenty of new opportunities for collaboration. These include cloud providers, and also banks and other companies that are considering moving away from AWS and similar platforms. There is a lot of follow up work ahead, and I am looking forward to it.

If there is one thing we could really use next time, it is more space. Between the university collaboration, the RISC-V demo and the steady stream of visitors, the booth was busy most of the time.

Thank you

Many thanks to all the speakers, organizers, volunteers and sponsors of the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026, and to all the people who helped secure our presence at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. Thank you also to everyone who staffed a booth or simply stopped by for a chat.

I hope to see many of you again at the openSUSE Conference 2027 in Prague from 11 to 13 June 2027!