Richard Brown

In 2017 I spoke at FOSDEM and told everyone about how Containerised App technologies like AppImage, Snap, and Flatpak were all terrible and posed the question "What could go wrong?" if we introduced them. Now, in 2022, I am building a Desktop Linux distribution that only uses Flatpaks for it's Apps, so obviously, something went horrifically wrong, but not with Flatpaks.

This talk will revisit some of my arguments from 2017, and discuss how the Flatpak team in particular embraced and addressed those concerns. It will also revisit the arguments advocating for traditional packaging and how they increasingly fall down when compared to the Flatpak way of doing things. That said, this session will try to present a balanced argument, and highlight the risks and responsibilities this approach requires and how some of the containerised app technologies still fail to meet those challenges.

As a conclusion, this session will present a vision for more distribution and packaging projects to follow, possibly narrowing the scope of their efforts to better collaborate and embrace the potential on this new way of getting FOSS software in the hands of users.

An overview and discussion regarding the openSUSE Project's latest rolling-release distribution, MicroOS. The session will detail how concerns regarding the stability of rolling releases are addressed by narrowing the scope of OS, and using technologies like (Atomic) Transactional Updates and automated health checking to guarantee the system keeps working. The session will cover how MicroOS is developed, and the broad range of suitable use cases, from Container server workloads, to Raspberry Pi's and Desktops including real-world examples from the community.

systemD has a very distribution-friendly way of providing it's configuration, with distributions providing defaults in /usr and users being able to override things either selectively or entirely with their own files in /etc. This is especially nice for distributions wishing to be in some way stateless, support a read-only root filesystem, or provide some kind of factory-reset. libeconf is a newly written C library to ease the adoption of similar configuration layering in other programs across the Linux ecosystem.

This talk will give a brief introduction to libeconf, how to use it in your existing programs and demonstrate some examples that have already adopted libeconf (eg. PAM, util-linux, rebootmgr, etc).

The session will also share some future plans and welcome suggestions for future contributions, especially for additional features, language bindings, etc.

The target audience is primarily developers of 'low level' distribution plumbing (eg. core daemons & services, package managers, etc) that are most likely to benefit from libeconf, but might be of interest to anyone developing any service for linux distributions.

As the world moves more and more towards containerised solutions, a number of real questions start to appear. - What is the perfect platform for running containers atop? - How to use this platform as part of a flexible, scalable, highly available infrastructure fabric? - How to minimize the maintenance and administration of this platform at scale?

All of these problems are well answered in an enterprise environment by SUSE CaaS Platform, but for developers more interested in the state of containers & kubernetes upstream, new issues start to appear. With such fast moving upstreams, developers and enthusiasts need a platform that can keep up and is closely involved with those upstream developments. This platform needs to not only be able to run containers at scale, but also on single machine, all the while preserving the attributes of low maintenance so the focus can be on the containers, not the base system beneath them.

This talk will introduce openSUSE Kubic, and explains how it addresses the above, being the perfect distribution for this modern age. The session will explore in some detail how Kubic is developed in lockstep with the Tumbleweed rolling release and various upstreams including kubeadm and CRI-O. Transactional Updates, Kubic's system update stack will be demonstrated and the benefits from such an atomic update approach discussed in some detail. Finally the kubeadm Kubernetes cluster boostrapping tool will be discussed and some future plans shared for consideration and feedback.

Attendees should come away from this talk with everything they need to know to get starting using, developing with and contributing to openSUSE Kubic.

As the world moves more and more towards containerised solutions, a number of real questions start to appear. - What is the perfect platform for running containers atop? - How to use this platform as part of a flexible, scalable, highly available infrastructure fabric? - How to minimize the maintenance and administration of this platform at scale?

All of these problems are well answered in an enterprise environment by SUSE CaaS Platform, but for developers more interested in the state of containers & kubernetes upstream, new issues start to appear. With such fast moving upstreams, developers and enthusiasts need a platform that can keep up and is closely involved with those upstream developments. This platform needs to not only be able to run containers at scale, but also on single machine, all the while preserving the attributes of low maintenance so the focus can be on the containers, not the base system beneath them.

This talk will introduce openSUSE Kubic, and explains how it addresses the above, being the perfect platform for container developers and enthusiasts. The session will mention how Kubic is based on the Tumbleweed rolling release and various upstreams including kubeadm and CRI-O. The kubeadm Kubernetes cluster boostrapping tool will be discussed in some detail and demonstrated, with some sneak peaks into how it may be extended in the future.

Attendees should come away from this talk with everything they need to know to get starting using, developing with and contributing to openSUSE Kubic.

This session will explore many different governance and decision making models in the Distribution world. Few projects aspire to operate under wholly democratic principles. This talk will explore some of the many flaws and problems with this approach, and how projects often struggle to operate democratically and at scale. Alternatively the session will also discuss the benefits, and weaknesses of less democratic governance models, such as Technical Committees, Governing Boards, and Benevolent Dictators for Life. Finally the talk will explore a simple, but scalable model of Distribution governance, empowering, enabling, and supporting the contributors in your project to create an environment where "Those that do, decide".

This talk will go into some detail about the various different governance and decision making processes of various Distribution projects. This will include both technical and organisational decision making within those projects. Examples will include the very democratic processes within the Debian Project, the more dictatorial processes within the Linux Kernel and Ubuntu, and hybrid models like seen in the Fedora Project. Care will be made to not be too judgemental or divisive, but the session will make factual observations about the strengths and weaknesses about each example. Those strengths and weaknesses will focus on both the benefits and problems technically to the project (ie. how well it helps projects put together good code), and socially (ie. how well it helps projects be sustainable communities of hopefully happy people).

It will be the speakers conclusion that both democratic and dictatorial models are ultimately flawed and neither scale well, nor actually provide an engaging environment for new contributors to join a long established project.

The session will then present a model that focuses on the empowerment of contributors, "those that do, decide", explaining how such a model has long, ancient roots in the origins of many open source projects. The talk will briefly hypothesise why the model is rarely found in distribution projects today, but present in some detail the core principles which Open Source projects should embrace from this philosophy, and (using openSUSE as an example), explain how to establish a healthy series of checks and balances to ensure a community following this model is both self sustainable, and relatively insulated to the problems with more democratic or dictatorial governance models often cause over time.

Containerised Application technologies like AppImage, Snappy and Flatpak promise a brave new world for Linux applications, free from the worries of shared libraries and dependency issues. Just one problem, this is a road long travelled before, such as in the application dark ages of Win32 applications and DLLs. And it worked out so wonderfully there... Do we risk a future where, like the resurrected dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, this family of applications will break their containment and start eating our users? This session will try to present a balanced argument about the situation, frankly discussing the benefits promised by these technologies, but highlighting the very real issues and risks their widespread adoption could, and in some cases are, already bringing to the table.

The talk with cover the promised benefits of application containers, such as AppImage, Snappy and Flatpak. It will detail the empowerment of developers who use the technologies, the ability for upstream projects to have a much closer role in delivering their software, and the benefits that brings to both the upstream projects and their users. But as a counter to those benefits, the session will detail some of the risks and responsibilities that come with that technology. The complexities of library integration, the risk of introducing new forms of dependency issues, and the transference of responsibility for those issues, plus security, away from the current Distributions delivering upstream projects towards those upstream projects directly. As a conclusion, the session will present some suggestions to upstream projects adopting these technologies to start them down the road of accepting those responsibilities directly, or working more closely with existing Distribution projects to share the burdens these technologies now provide.

Rolling Releases are the future of Linux distributions. They are already the better solution for power users & developers. The methodologies, techniques, and capabilities of Tumbleweed are opening up new doors, creating possibilities, and disrupting existing technologies beyond its borders. This session will explain how and why openSUSE Tumbleweed is paving the way for that future, while already being "the reliable rolling release". The talk will dispel the fears, uncertainties and doubts that many have regarding rolling releases in general and Tumbleweed specifically, and share how you can get involved both using, and improving, this exciting fast moving foundation of the openSUSE Project.

The audience is anyone interested in using recent versions of the Linux kernel or other upstream projects. This includes not only enthusiasts, but developers, especially Linux kernel developers and other developers of fast moving stacks who often benefit from having a stable platform with all the latest libraries and binaries available to them. Attendees can expect to get a solid understanding of how Tumbleweed is developed, it's strengths and benefits, as well as a comparison with Tumbleweed to other similar Linux-based rolling distributions. This presentation will encourage a broader adoption of rolling releases and the mentality, methodologies and capabilities that come with it. Tumbleweed and other similar rolling releases are key platforms to enable the high speed development of the Linux kernel and other key ecosystem components which increasingly move at a faster pace than 'traditional' Linux distributions can keep up. Rolling releases are also the natural platform for not only the development but the early adoption of key emerging technologies such as Containerisation and NFV.