DebConf26 closes in Santa Fe and DebConf27 announced

"[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:30:32 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.user.news
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
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The Debian Project                               https://www.debian.org/
DebConf26 closes in Santa Fe and DebConf27 announced    [email protected]
August 7th, 2026               https://www.debian.org/News/2026/20260807
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On Saturday 25 July 2026, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors
Conference [1] came to a close.

    1: https://debconf26.debconf.org/

Over 270 attendees representing 35 countries from around the world came
together for a combined 90 events (including some which took place
during the DebCamp) including more than 27 Talks, 21 Short Talks, 29
Birds of a Feather sessions ("BoF" – informal meeting between developers
and users), 8 workshops, and activities in support of furthering our
distribution and free software, learning from our mentors and peers,
building our community, and having a bit of fun.

The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp [2] hacking session
held 13 through 19 July where Debian Developers and Contributors
convened to focus on their individual Debian-related projects or work in
team sprints geared toward in-person collaboration in developing Debian.
As has been the case for several years, a special effort has been made
to welcome newcomers and help them become familiar with Debian and
DebConf by organizing a sprint "New Contributors Onboarding" every day
of Debcamp, followed more informally by mentorship during DebConf. Half
a dozen new contributors joined the sessions and learned about Debian,
free software, packaging and much more. This year, a week-long DebCamp
session was dedicated to auditing, patching, and modernizing the Go
ecosystem in Debian and enable the transition triggered by the recent
upload of dh-golang enabling GO111MODULE=on by default in Experimental.

    2: https://wiki.debian.org/DebCamp

In order to make the conference more accessible for local participants,
a local language track was included in the schedule for talks in
Spanish, as was done at DebConf19 in Brazil.

The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Monday 20 July 2026.
In addition to the traditional "Bits from the DPL" talk, the continuous
key-signing party, lightning talks, and the announcement of next year's
DebConf27, there were several update sessions shared by internal
projects and teams. Many of the hosted discussion sessions were
presented by our technical core teams with the usual and useful "Meet
the Technical Committee", three talks about Linux Kernel, early boot and
improving Debian’s kernel and installer support for Chromebooks, and
about twenty BoFs and talks about Debian packaging policy, Debian
infrastructure, security and privacy. This year, and echoing ongoing
discussions within the Free Software community, Artificial Intelligence
and Age Verification have been the subject of several talks. The Python,
Perl, Ruby, Go, and Rust programming language teams also shared updates
on their work and efforts. More than 17 BoFs and talks about community,
diversity, and local outreach highlighted the work of various teams
involved in not just the technical but also the social aspect of our
community.

The schedule [3] was updated each day with planned and ad hoc activities
introduced by attendees over the course of the conference. Several
traditional activities took place: a poetry performance, the traditional
Cheese and Wine party, the Group Photos, and the Day Trip.

    3: https://debconf26.debconf.org/schedule/

For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions
were broadcasted live and recorded. One can find the seventy hours of
recorded videos available via the conference schedule [4], or
alternatively through this link [5]. Almost all of the sessions
facilitated remote participation via IRC and Matrix messaging apps or
online collaborative text documents which allowed remote attendees to
"be in the room" and ask questions or share comments with the speaker or
assembled audience.

    4: https://debconf26.debconf.org/schedule/
    5:
https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2026/DebConf26/

DebConf26 saw over 341 T-shirts, a day trip, and up to 130 meals planned
per day. All of these events, activities, conversations, and streams
coupled with our love, interest, and participation in Debian and F/OSS
certainly made this conference an overall success both here in Santa Fe,
Argentina and online around the world.

The DebConf26 website [6] will remain active for archival purposes and
will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks
and events.

    6: https://debconf26.debconf.org/

Next year, Debconf27 [7] will be held in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan,
from Sunday September 5th to Saturday September 11th, 2027. As tradition
follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in Japan will start
the conference activities with DebCamp with a particular focus on
individual and team work towards improving the distribution.

    7: https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/27

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all
participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf26
website [8] for more details on this.

    8: https://debconf26.debconf.org/about/coc/

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors [9] to support
DebConf26, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak [10],
Proxmox [11], and our Gold Sponsors: Freexian [12], and Viridien [13].

    9: https://debconf26.debconf.org/sponsors/
   10: https://www.infomaniak.com
   11: https://www.proxmox.com/
   12: https://www.freexian.com/
   13: https://www.viridiengroup.com

We also wish to thank our Video and Infrastructure teams, the DebConf26
and DebConf committees, our host nation of Argentina, and each and every
person who helped contribute to this event and to Debian overall. Thank
you all for your work in helping Debian continue to be "The Universal
Operating System". See you next year!


About Debian
------------

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free
community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the
largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range
of computer types, Debian calls itself the "universal operating system".


About DebConf
-------------

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a
full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an
opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to
meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place
annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Korea, and France. More information about
DebConf is available from https://debconf.org [14].

   14: https://debconf.org/


About Infomaniak
----------------

Infomaniak [15] is an independent, employee-owned Swiss technology
company that designs, develops, and operates its own cloud
infrastructure and digital services entirely in Switzerland. With over
300 employees — more than 70% engineers and developers — the company
reinvests all profits into R&D. Its public cloud is built on OpenStack,
with managed Kubernetes, Database as a Service, object storage, and
sovereign AI services accessible via OpenAI-compatible APIs, all running
on its own Swiss infrastructure. Infomaniak also develops a sovereign
collaborative suite — messaging, email, storage, online office tools,
videoconferencing, and a built-in AI assistant — developed in-house and
as a privacy-respecting solution to proprietary platforms. Open source
is central to how Infomaniak operates. Its latest data center (D4) runs
on 100% renewable energy and uses no traditional cooling: all the heat
generated by its servers is captured and fed into Geneva's district
heating network, supplying up to 6,000 homes in winter and hot water
year-round. The entire project has been documented and open-sourced at
d4project.org [16].

   15: https://www.infomaniak.com
   16: https://d4project.org/


About Proxmox
-------------

Proxmox [17] develops powerful, yet easy-to-use open-source server
solutions. The comprehensive open-source ecosystem is designed to manage
divers IT landscapes, from single servers to large-scale distributed
data centers. Our unified platform integrates server virtualization,
easy backup, and rock-solid email security ensuring seamless
interoperability across the entire portfolio. With the Proxmox
Datacenter Manager, the ecosystem also offers a "single pane of glass"
for centralized management across different locations. Since 2005, all
Proxmox solutions have been built on the rock-solid Debian platform. We
are proud to return to DebConf26 as a sponsor because the Debian
community provides the foundation that makes our work possible. We
believe in keeping IT simple, open, and under your control.

   17: https://www.proxmox.com/


Contact Information
-------------------

For further information, please visit the DebConf26 web page at
https://debconf26.debconf.org/ or send mail to <[email protected]>.
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