Linux, Remote Desktop, OS Interop: Fedora @ FOSSCON 2017 Wrap-Up

FOSSCON is an annual open source conference held in Philadelphia. It also focuses on amateur radio and open education. It drew over 300 attendees this year.

Louis Wust (my friend who is a Fedora user, but not an ambassador) and I attended.

The event went well. Some highlights were:

2 Fedora contributors came to the table.
About 8 or so additional people who came to the table currently use Fedora. Another 15 or so have used it in the past.
Flatpak support (as built into GNOME Software) was an awesome selling point. You can just download the .flatpakref files from http://flatpak.org/apps.html and GNOME Software will offer to install them, along with screenshots.
The fact that Fedora has Flatpak support integrated, even into GNOME Software, was a way of differentiating Fedora from other distros.
For server admins, Fedora modularity/Boltron sparked people's interest.
Multiple developers were interested in Builder.
I brought along my Raspberry Pi and Motorola Lapdock that I am gifting. People were happy to see that such a small computer can run Fedora 26 with MATE and GNOME, even the latter with Wayland support.
christel, who is the head of the freenode project, stopped by. She mentioned an event in the UK, and that she would like Fedora to attend. I referred her to FamEMEA and #fedora-ambassadors.
The swag was extremely popular, as always.
The OLPC XO-1 may be 10 years old, but it still does an excellent job of drawing people to the table.
The Ubuntu US PA loco and Arch Linux ARM were there, and were friendly neighbors.

Some downsides though:

I tried to show someone DevAssistant. Unfortunately, it looks like it was removed as of Fedora 26.
It Motorola Lapdock blocked the view of the Raspberry Pi. Many people thought the Motorola Lapdock was simply a regular laptop.
Early on, someone pointed out that I should show off Fedora's amateur radio software. Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared to do this.
There were 2 issues with flatpaks. One is that it seemed to cause the live DVD ramdisk to run out of space. The other is that some apps on the website do not have screenshots.

I would like to thank Louis for attending, even though he is not an ambassador. Frequently I would be showing off Fedora to attendees and answering their questions, while Louis would be talking to the Linux users that come to the table and want to talk about their favorite text editor for 20 minutes.