CIQ at Open Source Summit 2026: Minneapolis Recap
I spent three days on the expo floor at Open Source Summit 2026 in Minneapolis with Howard Van Der Wal and Stephen Simpson, and it was one of the better events we have done this year.
The crowd was exactly what you want at a conference like this: engineers with opinions, researchers, university IT teams, homelab enthusiasts, and enterprise sysadmins who have been in the Linux world long enough to have strong feelings about everything. TechnoTim stopped by and got the full CIQ rundown from Stephen. Rocky Linux awareness was mixed, but the people who knew Enterprise Linux lit up when they heard about the support lifecycle, binary compatibility, and the stability story. And when someone mentioned Rocky Linux did not do FIPS and they had gone elsewhere for that reason, Stephen had exactly the right answer ready.
Ascender Pro got the strongest reactions on the floor. Howard had it running a live demo featuring the migrate2rlc playbook, and the response from a security engineer at a government office summed it up pretty well: “This is awesome. Where has this been my entire life?”
The highlight for me personally was the Jetson giveaway. We had four NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos to give away and instead of a raffle, we asked each person for a 60-second pitch on what they would actually build. Each board shipped preloaded with RLC Pro AI, CIQ’s Enterprise Linux distribution for AI and HPC workloads, with NVIDIA and AMD GPU drivers, CUDA, and PyTorch tuned for throughput right out of the box. The pitches drew around 20 people per session and the ideas were genuinely good: an automated lecture pipeline for university faculty, a tool to finally review decades-old industry safety protocols, targeted SLMs for specific software development tasks, and the one that stuck with me most, a parent building a real-time social context coach for his neurodivergent son. That last one is a good reminder that the most meaningful use cases for edge AI hardware are not always the ones that show up in a product brief.
Read the trip report on CIQ: Open Source Summit 2026
Events like this are a good reminder that the interest in open source infrastructure is real, and the people asking the questions are the ones actually running these systems.