Open Source Summit 2026: Minneapolis delivered

Minneapolis in May is a good place to be. The weather cooperated, the venue was spacious and well-run, and the people who showed up to Open Source Summit 2026 were exactly the kind of crowd you hope for at a conference like this: engineers with opinions, practitioners with real problems, and a community that genuinely cares about the tools they use.

CIQ came as a sponsor, and we brought the right team. Howard Van Der Wal and Stephen Simpson were on the floor for all three days alongside Eric Hendricks, and the conversations we had were some of the best we have had at any open source event this year.

The floor had energy

The expo floor was busy in the best way. Between the major vendors and the community figures who make this ecosystem run, there was no shortage of people worth talking to. TechnoTim, a tech creator with 330,000 subscribers on YouTube, stopped by the booth and got the full CIQ rundown from Stephen. The mix of people was real: researchers, university IT teams, homelab enthusiasts, enterprise sysadmins, and folks who have been in the Linux world long enough to have strong feelings about everything.

The giveaway turned into something better than a raffle. We had several NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos on the table, and rather than drawing a ticket, Eric had each interested person give a quick 60-second pitch on what they would actually do with it. It drew around 20 people per session and the ideas were genuinely good: an automated lecture pipeline for professors, a coach for a neurodivergent child to help navigate social contexts, a tool to finally review decades-old industry safety protocols, and targeted SLMs for specific software development tasks. That is the kind of thing that makes a booth worth stopping at.

What landed at the booth

Ascender Pro got the strongest reactions. Howard had it running on a monitor at the booth, and the live demo (featuring the migrate2rlc playbook) did more work than any one-pager could. A security engineer from a government office stopped by, watched for a moment, and said: "This is awesome. Where has this been my entire life?" That kind of response happened more than once. People wanted to know how to install it immediately.

Apptainer connected well with the security-conscious crowd. Containers compile to a single file, with no root requirement and no daemon. For the folks managing research clusters or locked-down environments, that combination was immediately compelling.

Rocky Linux awareness varied. A fair number of attendees had not heard of it, and we had plenty of conversations that started with "why not Ubuntu?" But Enterprise Linux users lit up when they heard about the slower, more stable update cadence, long support lifecycle, customizability, and applicability across a variety of workloads. One attendee shared that his organization had evaluated Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux during the CentOS transition and chose Rocky Linux for the long haul. It is easy to understand why. Rocky Linux is the only community Linux distribution that achieves bit-for-bit binary compatibility with Enterprise Linux, which means applications, certifications, and workflows built for Enterprise Linux run identically on Rocky. That foundation is why more than 2.75 million instances are actively deployed across research universities, federal agencies, financial services, healthcare, and AI infrastructure worldwide.

RLC Pro found at least one natural opening. When someone mentioned that Rocky Linux did not do FIPS and they had gone elsewhere for that reason, Stephen had the exact right answer ready: RLC Pro Hardened!

The sessions were strong too. An excellent talk on microVMs and a deep dive on automating kernel crash analysis with LLMs were both highlights that generated real interest and follow-up conversation on the floor.

A community worth being part of

There is something genuinely encouraging about showing up to an event like Open Source Summit and finding that the open source tools we build and support are what people want to talk about. The interest is real. And the people asking them are the ones actually running these systems.

We are glad we made the trip to Minneapolis, and we will be back.

If you stopped by the booth and want to pick up where we left off, portal.ciq.com is the place to start. RLC+, RLC Pro, and others are all there. If you want to stay connected with the Rocky Linux community directly, the RESF Mattermost is where that conversation lives.