tobias_platen's blog

This weekend I visited FOSDEM and the Guix Days in Brussels. On Thursday I went to the Guix Days, a FOSDEM Fringe event. There I met many GNU Guix and Spritely Goblins contributors. I have been using the Guix System for many years, and I have plans to run Guix on smartphones. Spritely Goblins looks as interesting as GNUnet and Taler for me, but I did hot have a deeper look yet. From my eduction in computer science, I know both distributed systems and actor models. Goblins can be used with both Guile and Racket. I prefere the Guile variant, since I already know Guile from Guix. We discussed why “guix pull” is so slow. I also had proposed a talk about Guix System on Alternative target architectures (ARM, RISCV, POWER etc.) including smartphones and my Talos II workstation, currently running Debian GNU/Linux. My second proposal was about Virtual Reality. Unfortunately both poposals have been rejected as there were too many good talks.

On Saturday, the first Day of FOSDEM, I was in the Android Open Source Project and FOSS on Mobile Devices devrooms. There were many interesting talks including “Forking Android considered harmful” and “Towards a purely open AOSP: Adding Android-like functionality to AOSP”. On the second half of the day I went to the “FOSS on Mobile Devices” devroom, where I met Caleb Connolly who works on Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mainline Linux. I also met them at the last FrOSCon where I presented my port of Minetest to the LibreM5, a smartphone running GNU/Linux. The first talk in the FOSS on Mobile Devices devroom was “Mainline vs libhybris: Technicalities, down to the buffer”, I also watched most others. I have used libhybris once, as part of Droidian running on my OnePlus 6T, a SDM845 phone. Due to bugs I switched back to Android, later I found out that my phone was not supported by Droidian anymore. By contrast, Mobian uses the Mainline Kernel and does not use Android drivers.

On Sunday I started in the JavaScript devroom, then moved to the “Declarative & Minimalistic Computing” devroom, where I met many of the those who I saw at Guix Days, on the days before FOSDEM. First I listened to the “Minimalist web application deployment with Scheme” talk, then I ate my second a vegan burger at FOSDEM(the first one one was at Saturday). Unfortunately most of the food offered at FOSDEM is still not vegan. Next I went to the Luanti and FOSS on Mobile Devices booths in the K building and talked with the developers about some of the projects that I am currently working on. After that I went back from where I came from to listen to the “The Whippet Embeddable Garbage Collection Library” talk before the most interesting talks about the GNU Shepherd and Spritely Goblins started. Unfortunately I missed the talks from Jessica Tallon and Christine Lemmer-Webber, as I went to the Robotics and Simulation devroom where I had two interesting talks about the “Open 3D Engine” and the “Valve’s Lighthouse 2.0 Technology”. While I prefer Godot for VR, I still liked both talks. I am also working on my VR headset using the “Lighthouse positioning deck” from Bitcraze and a postmarketOS compatible smartphone, currently running both Android and Mobian.

After those two talks I went to the Keynotes at Janson (the big room). Both “The Growing Body of Proprietary Infrastructure for FOSS Development: Repeating Bad History” and “How we are defending Software Freedom against Apple at the EU’s highest court” were pretty interesting talks from Free Software activists who I fully support. Finally I went to room near Jansen where people were working on Virtual Reality (VR). I did not know about Overte e.V. and their Social VR projects yet. I told one of the developers that I use components of V-Sekai in my BeatSaber clone. V-Sekai is more or less a clone of the non-free VRChat game, one of those games that are popular in the transgender community. I am nonbinary and trans myself, and met many other queers at both FOSDEM and Guix Days. Not fully out yet, I enjoy social VR where I can try out a feminine avatar, while presenting mostly masculine in real life. At FOSDEM I wore a skirt and a dress, makeup and cat ears. Next month I’ll plan to go to the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage conference.