LinuxFest Northwest 2026 trip report

LinuxFest Northwest has been earning its reputation consistently for 27 years now, and this year was no exception.

Bellingham delivered: beautiful spring weather, a walkable waterfront, and a conference that draws the kind of crowd that still cares deeply about the craft. This is not a place where corporations come to fish for leads. It is a gathering of students, hobbyists, longtime contributors, and the kind of sysadmins who have strong opinions about their terminal emulator. The energy is informal, the conversations are real, and the community is tight-knit in the best possible way.

CIQ came as friends of that community, representing our partners at the Rocky Linux project and the RESF.

Bellingham is a good host

No badge scanners, no lead capture, just a free community event where hundreds of people showed up because they wanted to be there. Saturday morning we brought donuts to share with neighbors on the expo floor, and the Marina Walking Tour got us out on the waterfront on a genuinely beautiful afternoon.

The evenings were just as good. Friday night the official conference social brought everyone together at Beach Cat Brewery: RESF alongside folks from Microsoft, Fedora, CentOS, and a mix of attendees and volunteers. Saturday the group moved to Brandywine Kitchen for dinner before heading to The Den for drinks. It was exactly the kind of cross-community connection that does not happen on Slack.

Rocky on the floor

Representing the Rocky Linux project at a grassroots Linux conference felt natural, and the conversations reflected that. We talked about migrations, automations, long-term support, and what people are actually running in their home labs and production environments. The audience here knows their stuff, and they asked good questions.

It helped to have the right people in the room. R. Leigh Hennig, CIQ’s Open Source Fellow, was on hand throughout the weekend alongside Eric Hendricks, a Rocky community contributor, Brady Dibble, CIQ's Director of Product and Technical Program Management, and Michael Young, a contributing software engineer. Having people who are genuinely part of the project made a real difference in how those conversations went.

If you stopped by and want to dig into what we were showing, portal.ciq.com is the place to start. RLC+ and RLC Pro are both there, along with everything you need to get hands-on.

A shoutout to everyone who came by and spent time talking with us. We look forward to hearing your stories.

Sessions at LinuxFest Northwest

CIQ had two talks on the program this year.

Escaping the End-of-Life Nightmare: Lessons from the Linux Graveyard Eric Hendricks, Technical Marketing Manager

If you have ever inherited a server running something that reached end of life two major versions ago, this talk was for you. Eric walked through the real costs of staying on aging Linux distributions and what a cleaner path forward actually looks like in practice.

Layered Security Hardening in Rocky Linux: Protection Before the Patch Brady Dibble, Director of Product Management

Brady made the case that security hardening is not something you bolt on after the fact. Starting from what Rocky Linux already provides, he walked through how layered hardening from the Security Special Interest Group (SIG) works in practice and why mitigating vulnerabilities matters more than patching fast.

Both sessions drew around 25 attendees and led to genuinely good conversations afterward. When the conference posts the recordings, we will share them on our YouTube channel. Keep an eye out.

See you next year

The community at LinuxFest NorthWest is real, the conversations are worth having, and Bellingham is a pretty great place to spend a spring weekend. We are glad we made the trip, and we are already looking forward to coming back.