The inaugural LinuxDays event took place the prior few days in Prague, Czech Republic where around 800 open-source developers and users converged for a series of meetings and technical sessions.
LinuxDays in Prague is a new event designed to succeed Prague's LinuxExpo conference. LinuxDays took place at the ČVUT university and co-hosted alongside LinuxDays was the openSUSE Conference, Gentoo Mini Conference, and SUSE Labs. The SUSE events are still going on today and tomorrow while the rest of the conference was just a weekend affair.
While this was the first LinuxDays to happen and had high hopes considering it pulled in multiple distributions (aside from Gentoo and openSUSE, there were also Fedora and Ubuntu members too), the event itself turned out to be rather a disappointment; this just wasn't my opinion but it seemed to be the consensus from most that I talked to as well.
The event also felt more like an expanded openSUSE Conference rather than something truly community-focused and targeting Linux as a whole rather than just one particular distribution. The Gentoo Mini Conference and the other sessions just felt tacked on rather than truly integrated and part of the event.
Originally I heard that they were expecting around 1,000 Linux users/developers to be in attendance, but in the end I heard that it was likely more about 800 or less that actually showed. In many ways, the event felt rather disorganized. While this was the first LinuxDays to be held, the conference was largely organized by SUSE and their representatives with much experience in event organization, etc. The event was a disappointment and largely a waste to travel to from America.
Also disappointing many at the event was the conference party. While the parties are usually a highlight of conferences and summits, here their "big party" was worthless. In approximately the first 30 minutes of the event, all of the complimentary drinks at the event had diminished. There was no clear organization and ended up just being a FIFO queue for those to scramble and get as much free alcohol as possible before it disappeared (I heard afterwards that they had allotted something like 400 complimentary beverages for the 800~1000 attendees). It was also the same way for the food at the event, but that disappeared even faster with there being hundreds of Linux nerds. Many people, including I, ended up leaving the LinuxDays party early to find better places to spend the evening. Their pre-event party on Friday was also a disappointment and I also heard their invite-only "community dinner" was less than stellar.
In terms of the value of the sessions, there were only a few that caught my attention as being worthy in technical merits rather than just being fluffy marketing-level talk or just covering general information. Some of what I covered was
OpenSUSE on ARM,
Wayland, and
Gentoo Linux Gaming. Among other silly things about the event was also the printing of openSUSE's Code of Conduct for all attendees.
For those European Linux users looking for events to attend for 2013, over LinuxDays in Prague I would
highly recommend FOSDEM in Brussels and
LinuxTag in Berlin. Both LinuxTag and FOSDEM are superior to this LinuxDays collection of events in almost every regard.
