Texas Linux Fest is a community conference for Linux, open source and free software. It has run in Texas since 2010, and apart from the years lost to the pandemic it happens annually. The festival moves around the state — it has been held in Austin, San Antonio, San Marcos and Irving — and each edition gets its own website for that year’s schedule, talks and registration. This site is the permanent home that ties those editions together.
Who runs it
Texas Linux Fest is organized entirely by volunteers and is an educational non-profit organization. Nobody is paid to put the event on. Our mission is to bring good technical content to Texas and to build up the technical community here, which means keeping the event affordable, keeping it in Texas, and keeping it welcoming.
What the event is like
We have had excellent keynotes over the years — from Karen Sandler and Matt Lee to Dustin Kirkland — but the part we care most about is the rest of the schedule. Texas Linux Fest is deliberately friendly to people giving their first talk as well as their hundredth. A first-time speaker gets the same room, the same audience and the same help preparing as anyone else. Talks cover the whole range of the ecosystem: kernel and systems work, distributions, security, developer tooling, community and governance, and the practical business of running open source in production.
Attendance is open to anyone. You do not need to be a developer, a Texan, or already involved in open source to come. A large share of every audience is people who showed up curious and stayed for the next ten years.
History
The first Texas Linux Fest was held at The Marchesa in Austin in April 2010. Since then the festival has been hosted at the Hilton Austin, the Norris Conference Center in San Antonio, the AT&T Conference Center at UT Austin, the Austin Convention Center, the San Marcos Conference Center, the Irving Convention Center, the Palmer Events Center, and the Commons Conference Center at UT Austin. Every edition has its own page on this site listing the venue, the dates, the keynotes, a link to that year’s schedule, and the press and podcast coverage from that year.
Finding the current event
The home page of this site always links to the next Texas Linux Fest. Schedules, call for papers, ticketing and sponsorship for a given year are handled on that year’s own site, not here.