Rocky Linux at SouthEast Linux Fest 2026

SouthEast Linux Fest drew a crowd that felt less like a conference and more like a reunion: the kind of event where you run into the same person twice in an hour, trade contact info, and mean it when you say you will follow up. For a community-driven project like Rocky Linux, that atmosphere is exactly right.

Rocky Linux was a Gold sponsor at SELF 2026, held June 12 through 14 at the Sonesta Charlotte Lower South End Hotel. The event is free to attend, in person or online, and that accessibility shapes who shows up. You get students, hobbyists, seasoned sysadmins, and curious newcomers all in the same room. The Fallout theme running through the venue did not hurt the mood either.

The people made it

The conversations at SELF tend to go deeper than a typical conference floor interaction. People come because they want to be there, not because a manager approved a travel budget. That makes a difference.

One exchange that stuck with us: a college student explained his pitch for one of our CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 giveaways. He wants to write open source software to help locate lost hikers in the mountain passes near his home. Another came from a Filipino woman who planned to use her Pi to teach fellow immigrants English and basic computer skills. Both ideas were exactly what a 60-second pitch format is meant to surface: real problems, real motivation, and a clear plan. Those two walked away with the hardware. Many Rocky Linux shirts and pins found good homes too.

Plenty of booth time went to talking through the Enterprise Linux development pipeline. The Fedora to CentOS Stream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Rocky Linux path generates genuine curiosity, and it is a satisfying conversation to have with someone working through it for the first time. Rocky Linux sits at the end of that chain as a stable, community-built release with a long support lifecycle and binary compatibility with Enterprise Linux. For a lot of the people at SELF, that story lands immediately.

Talks from the team

Eric Hendricks gave two sessions that could not have been more different in topic but were equally well-received.

The first was a tabletop role-playing game introduction held after hours. Using Dungeon Worlds as the entry point, the session introduced TTRPG mechanics to players who had never rolled dice in that context before. It filled up and ran long in the best way.

The second talk, "From Bash to Burnout: Staying Sane in a 24/7 Tech World," addressed something the Linux community does not talk about often enough. IT burnout is real, it builds gradually, and the habits that lead there are easy to miss until you are already in them. Eric walked through the warning signs and practical strategies for protecting your energy without checking out of work you care about. The room was engaged throughout, which tells you something about how much this topic resonates.

Joseph Tate delivered two technical sessions. The first, "Secure Secrets in Kubernetes," took on a problem many K8s operators have quietly wrestled with: the built-in Secrets mechanism is not as secret or secure as the name implies. The talk walked through HashiCorp Vault as an open source alternative, including the real work involved in making it integrate cleanly with Kubernetes.

The second was "FluxCD for GitOps K8s Deployments," a practical look at using FluxCD to make Kubernetes deployments more repeatable and reversible. Joseph covered the tradeoffs honestly, including the gotchas, which is exactly what an audience of practitioners needs.

Worth the trip

SELF is one of those events that reminds you why community matters in open source. The people who attend are invested. The conversations are substantive. And the fact that it is free means the barrier to showing up is low enough that the right people actually do.

We plan to be back next year!

If you want to get involved with Rocky Linux directly, the community lives at chat.rockylinux.org. If you missed any of the SELF 2026 sessions, check the schedule at southeastlinuxfest.org.