DevConf US 2026: Lessons Learned About Reaching Students in Open Source & Linux

DevConf US is a community conference focused on developers and Red Hat technologies. Being held on the Boston University campus during the academic semester meant we knew we would see students. What I did not fully anticipate was how the increased student presence here would reshape what I thought our booth should accomplish.

Alongside my colleagues Shaun McCance, Matthew Miller, Amy Marrich, and To Hung Sze, we staffed a joint Fedora and CentOS table. We kept the booth table light, compared to other events. We did not have any laptop demos, elaborate staging, or any fancy technical displays. We brought ourselves and our trusty Pelican event box full of stickers, lanyards, pins, and swag.

Most people who stopped by the table already knew Fedora, or at least recognized the logo. Most were students, but not all. We also met faculty members, industry professionals, and contributors to other open source projects. However, there was an unmistakable pattern among the students who approached us. For nearly all of them, their first real exposure to Linux happened in university computer science labs. And in university labs, Ubuntu is almost universally the default.

For these students, Ubuntu was not simply a distribution preference. For them, Ubuntu was Linux.

What surprised me most was that they were not defensive about it. They were genuinely curious. They wanted to understand what else was out there, how different systems fit together, and why alternative distributions mattered. The subsequent conversations with those students are some of the most interesting, fun conversations to have at a Fedora booth.

That curiosity opened the door to talk about Fedora’s foundational place in the broader Linux ecosystem. When you use Fedora, you are standing directly at the upstream source of enterprise Linux everywhere.

For the curious, the pitch goes something like this. Every three years, Fedora branches to become the foundation for CentOS Stream, which in turn feeds directly into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). However, the reach does not stop with Red Hat products, which is often unknown to most students. Downstream enterprise rebuilds like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux trace their lineage back through CentOS Stream to Fedora. Furthermore, hyperscalers stand out as interesting downstream operating systems too. For example, Amazon Linux is derived from Fedora Linux. And this year, Microsoft announced that Azure Linux, their custom hypervisor container OS, will base its future architecture on Fedora.

So, when you study and use Fedora, you are not just learning another distribution. You are standing at the mouth of the river. You see the innovations before they flow into every major cloud provider and enterprise datacenter in the world.

The students understood that value proposition immediately. They grasped the architectural power of being upstream. However, the conversations that truly resonated were not about packaging flags or kernel versions. They were about careers.

Students were asking how to build practical skills, how to level up beyond coursework, and what industry engineering teams actually look for. A handful asked specifically about how to contribute to open source and get involved with Fedora.

That is where I realized what our booth was missing. We had no clear call to action.

We could explain the architecture, and we could illustrate the ecosystem on a whiteboard, but we could not smoothly shepherd someone from curiosity to contribution. We lacked a concrete on-ramp. We had no printed guide explaining the first three steps to take after leaving the venue. We had no five-minute interactive exercise someone could complete right at the table to earn something tangible. Instead, we offered a sprawling overview of "everything you can do in Fedora," which is paralyzing when you are just getting started.

Years ago, as a student at RIT and a Fedora Ambassador, I staffed more than a few Fedora booths at collegiate hackathons like HackMIT and Bitcamp. Back then, I learned a vital lesson about engaging students: they need hands-on, achievable activities.

Students need something doable, self-contained, and repeatable. Most importantly, they need something they can earn. A unique reward, like an event badge or a milestone achievement, creates an enduring memory. A standard sticker gets lost in a backpack; a challenge you solved at a booth creates a personal reason to stay connected to the community.

Executing a commercial trade-show booth strategy at a student-heavy venue does not work. Commercial attendees often browse passively for vendor solutions; students are actively planning their futures and want to understand how distributed engineering collaboration functions in the real world. Free Software and open source are precisely that, but we have to frame them to meet their goals.

If we want to translate curiosity into long-term community contributors, our playbook needs three tangible upgrades:

So, should Fedora & CentOS return to DevConf US? Absolutely. DevConf US is a fantastic venue, but next time we must arrive prepared for the audience in the room. The curiosity is already there. We just need to build the bridge that lets them cross over into upstream work.