SouthEast LinuxFest 2026: Recap

SouthEast Linux Fest has a different feel than most conferences I attend. It is less trade show, more reunion. You run into the same person twice in an hour, swap contact info, and actually mean it when you say you will follow up. For a community project like Rocky Linux, that atmosphere is exactly the right fit.

Rocky Linux sponsored as a Gold sponsor this year, June 12 through 14 in Charlotte. SELF is free to attend, in person or online, and that accessibility shapes the crowd in a good way. You get students, hobbyists, sysadmins, and curious newcomers all mixed together, with a Fallout theme running through the venue that did not hurt the vibe one bit.

The booth conversations were the highlight for me. A lot of time went to walking people through the Enterprise Linux pipeline, Fedora to CentOS Stream to RHEL to Rocky Linux, and watching that click for someone hearing it for the first time never gets old. We also gave away CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 kits based on 60-second pitches, and two stuck with me. A college student wants to build open source software to help locate lost hikers in the mountain passes near his home. A Filipino woman planned to use hers to teach fellow immigrants English and basic computer skills. Both walked away with hardware, and both were exactly the kind of real, motivated use case that format is built to surface.

I gave two talks of my own this year, and they could not have been more different. The first was an after-hours TTRPG introduction using Dungeon World as the entry point for people who had never rolled dice outside a board game. It filled up and ran long, which is the best problem a session like that can have. The second was “From Bash to Burnout: Staying Sane in a 24/7 Tech World,” a talk I have given a few times now but one that still surprises me with how engaged the room gets every time. IT burnout builds slowly and quietly, and most people do not notice it happening until they are already deep in it. Talking through the warning signs and what actually helps clearly resonates with this crowd.

Joseph Tate rounded out the team’s session lineup with two technical talks: “Secure Secrets in Kubernetes,” covering why the built-in Secrets mechanism does not live up to its name and how HashiCorp Vault fills the gap, and “FluxCD for GitOps K8s Deployments,” a practical, honest look at using FluxCD for repeatable Kubernetes deployments, gotchas included.

SELF is one of those events that reminds you why community matters in open source. Free admission keeps the barrier low, and the people who show up because they want to be there are the ones worth talking to. We will be back next year.

If you missed any of the SELF 2026 sessions, the schedule is still up at southeastlinuxfest.org.