talks

Sit down and listen

The talk track runs from nothing assumed to genuinely deep, in that order, so the room gets more technical as the day goes on. Come in the morning if you are new. Come after lunch if you already run Linux.

all times and speaker names are provisional confirm

headline talk10:30 · 60 min · ballroom a

Fully Transitioning to Linux: A Privacy and Ownership Story

The account of moving a working life, files, photos, documents, banking, work software and all, off systems that report back and onto ones that do not. What broke and how it got fixed. What turned out to be simpler than expected. What is still a compromise, said out loud rather than glossed over.

If you only sit through one thing, sit through this. Everything else on the schedule is a practical answer to the question it raises.

beginner privacy desktop no laptop needed

speaker [speaker name needed] Short bio, two sentences, plus a headshot at 400 by 400. [photograph needed]

the question the talk answers


      $
      df -h /home
    

      $
      Filesystem      Size  Used Avail  Mounted on
    

      $
      /dev/nvme0n1p2  467G  188G  256G  /home
    

      $
      whose disk is it, and who else has a key?
    

      $

The rest of the track

difficulty beginner some experience deep

morning · nothing assumed

11:45 45 min

Your first week on Linux: what changes and what does not

[speaker tbd] desktop Ballroom A

beginner

Which version of Linux to pick and why Linux Mint is the sensible first answer. Where your files live. What replaces the programs you use now, including a working alternative to Office and to Photoshop. What the first Monday morning actually feels like.

13:00 45 min

That ten year old laptop is a perfectly good computer

[speaker tbd] old hardware Ballroom A

beginner

A machine that has become unusably slow is usually running software that outgrew it, not hardware that died. What to check before you spend money, which parts are worth replacing, and which Linux versions are built for older machines.

afternoon · some experience helps

14:00 45 min

One service at a time: getting out of the cloud

[speaker tbd] self hosting Ballroom B

some experience

Self hosting means running a service on a machine you own instead of renting it monthly. This one starts with two: Jellyfin, which serves your own films and music to your own devices, and CasaOS, which is a plain dashboard that makes running those services on a home machine manageable.

15:00 45 min

What DRM actually takes from you

[speaker tbd] privacy Ballroom A

some experience

DRM is the lock a company puts on something you paid for so it can decide how you use it. This talk goes through real cases: books removed from devices, games that stopped working when a server was retired, files you cannot open without a live subscription. Then what to do about it.

late afternoon · deep end

16:00 45 min

Running your own email, honestly

[speaker tbd] self hosting Ballroom B

deep

Self hosted email is the hardest thing in this room, and this session says so. What it takes to have mail delivered and accepted, what breaks, what it costs in attention every month, and the cases where the right answer is to pay a small provider instead.

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The /dev/random lightning track

Five minutes each, one after another, on anything in range: a script you wrote, a machine you fixed, a service you host, a piece of software you think more people should use. The name is a joke about the file on every Linux system that produces random output, and the running order is about as predictable.

First time speakers are the point of it. Slides are optional. If five minutes of talking sounds like a lot, it is not: it is about four hundred words, which is less than this page has already asked of you.

Submit a lightning talk [confirm: form or email address]

16:458 slots

5 minutes, hard stop, timed on screen.
No topic approval. If it runs on free software it qualifies.
Sign up on the day at the front table if slots are left.
Questions happen afterwards in the room, not on the clock.

Running order posted on the floor that morning.