We Had A Booth At Texas Linux Fest 2025!
I have to tell you that we didn’t expect to get much traffic at our little table at Texas Linux Fest. We’re just a couple of guys who brought a 3D printer competing with big companies like Rackspace and Framework for eyeballs, and Framework has those really cool laptops that everyone got to put their hands on! We also dragged our friends Mike and James along to help us hold down the fort, and they did a fantastic job.
There were some slow periods when the talks were full, but had at least one person chatting with most of the time we were there, and we had people waiting in line to see what was going on more than a few times!
Brian and I talked to so many people. I remember so many excellent conversations. I remember quite a few names. I am realizing that I didn’t necessarily do a good job of properly connecting the triplet of names, faces, and conversations correctly in my head. It was just too many things to keep track of over the span of two days!
I was excited that we weren’t there to sell anything. Though Brian does stock the nifty low-power NAS-focused motherboard that was part of the giveaway in his eBay store, most of what we talked about wound up focused much more heavily on the 3D-printing aspect of things. I think that motherboard is right in the sweet spot for a home server, but I only heard Brian mention that you could buy one from him twice, and it was only after he got prodded pretty hard on the motherboard specs and availability.
The DIY NAS giveaway was a huge success!
It was both a success because someone got to walk away with a 3D-printed NAS, and also because Brian said it was the most fun he’s ever had giving away a NAS. He has given away quite a few over the last decade, too!
Brian printed makerunit’s 6-bay NAS case from Printables. He modified it slightly to replace makerunit’s logo with a Texas Linux Fest logo, and Brian printed the case in the Texas Linux Fest colors.
Brian didn’t fill any of the 3.5” bays, but there is room for six hard drives, so the winner could cram this full with up to 180 terabytes of raw storage. He did load the Intel N150 motherboard with 32 gigabytes of RAM, a 256-gigabyte NVMe for the boot drive, and a 4-terabyte NVMe for storage, and that awesome little motherboard has a pair of 2.5-gigabit Ethernet ports and even a 10-gigabit Ethernet port.
Most attendees were software developers?!
Listen. I haven’t been to a Linux conference since going to a couple of LinuxWorld Expos around 2001 and 2002. The vast majority of vendors showing off their stuff back then was targeted at system admins: servers with Linux pre-installed, RAID controllers with good Linux support, or server monitoring and administration software. That sort of stuff.
I don’t have formal metrics on this, but I feel like the vast majority of people we chatted with over the weekend were software developers. I would probably say that coding is my weakest area within the range of skills that were relevant to the people who might attend Texas Linux Fest, but most of the friendly people we talked to have an equivalent hole in their knowledge when it comes to server hardware and things closer to the bare metal.
This photo with me right in the center of the frame claims it was taken at LinuxWorld Expo in New York in 2022
It was fun to learn about things where I have gaps in my knowledge, especially where I’ve gotten more and more outdated as I don’t do any of this stuff as a day job anymore. It was equally enjoyable being able to fill in the gaps that other people have.
At one point we had five or six people crowded around in front of our table, most of whom seems to be developers–I didn’t ask was every single person does for their day job! It has been a long time since I’ve participated in a conversation like this with so many smart people.
It felt like we were almost going around in a circle. Everybody had something to contribute. I think even the smartest of us, which almost definitely wasn’t me, managed to learn something.
It wasn’t all just extreme tech jibber jabber!
We had more than a few people stop by to chat with us about the 3D printers they already own. It was fun getting to show off the sort of features every Bambu Lab or current generation Prusa printer have compared to their older printers from the Ender 3 days. We might have ran a dozen print jobs over two days on my Bambu A1 Mini without a single failure.
We also talked to more than a few people who were interested in buying a 3D printer, but they haven’t had the confidence to pull the trigger. Most people were surprised at the price and capabilities of the little printer I brought with me, and I got to let a few people kick off a fresh print job just to see how easy it can be. I feel like we gave everyone some solid advice.
Some people asked about 3D modeling for 3D printing. When people asked me this at our local makerspace, most of them looked at me like I was out of my mind when I explained how I use OpenSCAD for my 3D-modeling needs. Most of the people I talked to at Texas Linux Fest were coders. Usually their faces perked up at least a bit when I explained how OpenSCAD creates models from diffs and unions of shapes like cubes and cylinders, and how you can use loops and conditionals to place those shapes.
Mike and I chatted with Brett about 3D printing for his retro-computing project, which may or may not have revolved around their Commodore VIC-20 or a yet to be purchased Commodore PET.
I chatted with someone who was working to open a community center in rural El Salvador. He was asking about 3D printing in relation to that, and he was very interested to learn that soda bottles can easily be converted into reasonably decent 3D-printing filament. I pointed him towards CNC Kitchen’s video about inexpensively converting bottles to PET filament.
There were some awesome talks, but I didn’t manage to get to any of them!
I probably should have set some alarms to make sure I would make it to at least one talk, but we wound up being pretty busy. I did a bad job.
I don’t know if I should tell you this, because I don’t want to accidentally disrespect anyone, but I picked the two talks that I WANTED to attend based almost entirely on the headshots of the speakers. I picked the ones that looked like they had the least corporate photos!
I was interested in Sophia Solomon’s Grep Can’t Help You Now: Observability for LLMs talk, and Willard Nilges’s Lessons Learned Building Observability for a Non-Profit. I picked Sophia’s talk because she looked friendly, and I enjoyed that she was showing us a 3D-printed Flexi Rex.
I was amazed that one of the first people to stop by our booth was Willard, so I at least got to tell him that I was planning to go listen to what he had to say!
I don’t know how I didn’t picked Joshua Lee’s Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores. His headshot is awesome, and it is for sure not in the standard corporate style. We did get to hang out with Joshua before his talk, and we spoke about a lot of cool things! I also heard from our friend James that Josh’s talk was fantastic.
We also made a new friend when Swetha Garaga stopped by our table to chat with us about 3D printing before her gave her talk titled Human‑Centered Automation: Equity and Efficiency in Modern Warehousing. Swetha was a delight, and I definitely hope everything went smooth for her!
The talks are all being processed and uploaded to the Texas Linux Fest YouTube channel, but I can’t link to the talks I mentioned above. They haven’t been uploaded just yet!
We missed the afterparty!
Meta, a.k.a. the Facebook and Instagram company, was buying the drinks Lavaca Street Bar just a few minutes drive from the venue. Brian is an old man, so he wanted to take a break after dinner. I am also an old man, and my social batteries were almost as drained as Brian’s, and my throat was starting to get a little coughy by the end or each day, so I probably shouldn’t be hollering at people in a noisy bar.
Hopefully we’ll make it to the afterparty next year, and you can join us in spending Meta’s money on alcohol. I don’t know that Meta will be footing this particular bill next year, but one can hope!
Texas Linux Fest 2026?!
I’ve manned more than one booth in my day, but they always had a narrow focus. The things that sit under the Butter, What?! umbrella are fairly diverse, and there was only a thin thread connecting us from Linux to the 3D-printed NAS to the 3D printer that we brought.
I think we learned a lot, and I am certain we will do a better job when Texas Linux Fest rolls around again. We are told that it is tentatively scheduled for November 6 and 7 or 2025, so I hope you keep your calendars open around that time so you can stop by and see us!
We have already had a few people that we met at our booth join our friendly Discord community. If you met us at Texas Linux Fest, then you should definitely drop in an say hello. If you didn’t attend Texas Linux Fest, you should still stop by and say hello! We have channels for a wide range of partially overlapping geeky topics. The key point of overlap is probably that almost everything in there is adjacent to a hobby that Brian and I share.