Hello travelers!

Loadouts for Genshin Impact v0.1.18 is OUT NOW with the addition of support for recently released characters like Sandrone and for recently released weapons like A Teaspoon of Transcendence from Genshin Impact Luna VIII or v6.7 Phase 2. Take this FREE and OPEN SOURCE application for a spin using the links below to manage the custom equipment of artifacts and weapons for the playable characters.

Resources

• Loadouts for Genshin Impact - GitHub
• Loadouts for Genshin Impact - PyPI
• Loadouts for Genshin Impact v0.1.18
  • Executable for GNU/Linux distributions
  • Executable for Microsoft Windows

Installation

Besides its availability as a repository package on PyPI and as an archived binary on PyInstaller, Loadouts for Genshin Impact is now available as an installable package on Fedora Linux. Travelers using Fedora Linux 42 and above can install the package on their operating system by executing the following command.

$ sudo dnf install gi-loadouts --assumeyes --setopt=install_weak_deps=False

Changelog

• Complete the 4-piece bonus for Disenchantment in Deep Shadow by @qorexdevs in #575
• Revisit the title case class names for weapons by @gridhead in #570
• Added Sandrone to Loadout by @Ank-22 in #578
• Added A Teaspoon of Transcendence by @Ank-22 in #579
• Review A Teaspoon Of Transcendence inclusion by @gridhead in #582
• Create separate GitHub Action for generating point releases by @gridhead in #571
• Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #566
• Disable caching while building executable binaries by @gridhead in #584
• Update actions/download-artifact action to v8 by @renovate[bot] in #583
• Stage the release v0.1.18 for Genshin Impact Luna VIII (v6.7 Phase 2) by @gridhead in #585

Characters

One character has debuted in this version release.

Sandrone

Sandrone is a claymore-wielding Cryo character of five-star quality.

Weapons

One weapon has debuted in this version release.

A Teaspoon of Transcendence

White Fairy's Queening - Scales on Crit DMG.

Appeal

While allowing you to experiment with various builds and share them for later, Loadouts for Genshin Impact lets you take calculated risks by showing you the potential of your characters with certain artifacts and weapons equipped that you might not even own. Loadouts for Genshin Impact has been and always will be a free and open source software project, and we are committed to delivering a quality experience with every release we make.

Disclaimer

With an extensive suite of over 1584 diverse functionality tests and impeccable 100% source code coverage, we proudly invite auditors and analysts from MiHoYo and other organizations to review our free and open source codebase. This thorough transparency underscores our unwavering commitment to maintaining the fairness and integrity of the game.

The users of this ecosystem application can have complete confidence that their accounts are safe from warnings, suspensions or terminations when using this project. The ecosystem application ensures complete compliance with the terms of services and the regulations regarding third-party software established by MiHoYo for Genshin Impact.

All rights to Genshin Impact assets used in this project are reserved by miHoYo Ltd. and Cognosphere Pte., Ltd. Other properties belong to their respective owners.

When I was just about getting used to the time zone shift and the hotel bedding, 17th June 2026 came, and I had to leave Prague. Even though I did my packing beforehand, I still found myself waking up as early as around 0500am Central European Summer Time. My scheduled flight, Emirates EK0140, was going to take off from Prague (PRG) for Dubai (DXB) at 0400pm Central European Summer Time, so I had plenty of time to connect with family and friends back home. After having a quick breakfast by myself at around 0730am Central European Summer Time, I saw Tomáš Hrčka leaving the Ibis Praha Mala Strana hotel at that time. I made a brief return to Nový Smíchov Shopping Centre to purchase more goodies for my folks before returning to meet with a departing Lenka Segura at breakfast.

I also met with Kamil Paral briefly, who was on his way out too, and Lukas Ruzicka and Adam Williamson at the hotel lobby, who were planning on leaving too. After dropping my goods at the hotel, I headed over to the nearby Rossmann Cosmetics outlet for some purchases, as advised by my sister-in-law and my mother. As the Douglas Lifestyle inside the Nový Smíchov Shopping Centre did not open by then, this also allowed me to walk a little further on an overcast morning, after it seemed to have rained heavily the previous night. Taking the scenic route while heading back to the hotel, I clicked a bunch of pictures while being on a video call with my family members along the walking route. As the designated check-out time was 1200pm Central European Summer Time, I had plenty of time to pack my goods.

Thanks to the spring balance that I was carrying with me, I got my checked-in luggage to around 24 kilograms - staying well under the Emirates standard limit of 30 kilograms, while my travelling backpack was barely about 5 kilograms heavy. I started heading downstairs at around 1150am Central European Summer Time, and with the checkout done, I started looking for cabs on the Uber application. It took forever for a ride to be booked on that platform, so I instead relied on the Bolt application, which got me a ride in about the next 10 minutes or so. I was able to swiftly make it to Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) by around 1245pm Central European Summer Time, and after a failed attempt at securing the VAT refund, I decided to have myself checked in for the journey without wasting more time on it.

At the designated Emirates check-in gates, there were automated kiosks for self-service with multiple human attendants too, for if (read whenever) someone faced difficulties with the novel process. After having my luggage sent and a quick chat with the human attendants to ensure that the check-in kiosk also accounted for layover journeys, I headed into the immigration checks. Surprisingly enough, the immigration process, both during arrival and departure, was stamp-free and very seamless. I, for one, loved getting immigration stamps on my passport, so while that did ease the process significantly, I realized that we were giving away yet another organic process for convenience's sake. The crazy short immigration time meant that I had more time (read money) to spend at the Aelia Duty Free Stores!

Restricting my needless purchases to just chocolates and collectibles, I finally came to Gate B8, from where my Emirates EK0140 was going to be boarded. At around 0230pm Central European Summer Time, I had a Chicken Cheddar Panini Meal for lunch because I knew it would take a while before lunch was served during the flight. At around 0300pm Central European Summer Time, when the flight was finally starting to board, the Prague Airport (PRG) had another shocking surprise for me. Not only was my water bottle discarded - only for them to have a water vending automated machine on the other side of the checks - but I was also frisked physically after passing through the metal detectors without any buzzing concerns, and my purchases from their duty free airport stores were separately checked too.

Being a frequent traveller, I always made sure to remove my metal-hooked boots too to ensure that the security checks went through just fine, so believe me when I say - I was absolutely shocked when that actually happened. To add further insult to injury, their automated water vending machine was fancy enough to get my purchased water bottle stuck, with no one to help me with it. Not only was I forced to stay thirsty until I could board the flight, but there were also additional checks using German Shepherd sniffer dogs that everyone was subjected to. As you could imagine - I was super pissed at the overall situation, but I stayed calm regardless, as the last thing I wanted to do was spoil my mood further and worsen the ongoing affair - also not a choice note on which I wanted to end my Flock 2026 journey...

The flight finally took off, with us being seated in the flight after the final checks, at around 0400pm Central European Summer Time, and I decided to catch up on some respite. I knew that with the rush that I had to make in Dubai (DXB) during the short ninety-minute-long layover, I would be able to use some of the recovered energy. Unlike my arrival flight, which had almost eight hours of dreadful layover, I had a shorter one this time, which could have ended up being even more tricky if the transit buses were involved. After being served meals and finishing off the third season of Oshi No Ko (2023), I finally had some sleep on the six-hour-long flight. The fact that I had an empty seat between my window seat and the aisle seat also helped me avoid the overcrowded affairs in flying economy on longer flights.

At around 1230am Gulf Standard Time, I found the flight closing in on Dubai International Airport (DXB), and yet again, we were at an airport concourse - not an arrival gate. With the transit bus taking away almost thirty minutes for me to make it to the arrival gate, I was thankful that the security checks passed with zero hitches. The fact that I landed at different gates hurt as now I also had to give fifteen minutes on a transit train to travel closer to the Series A departure gates. Minus the peak rush, I had to sprint to the travelator escalator in Terminal 3 with my lightweight backpack to finally make it closer to my designated gates. At that defining moment, moving all the heavy things to the checked-in luggage felt like the right thing to do, and I was able to sprint on for a longer duration as a result.

The layover rush finally ended when I finally made it to Gate A12, where the boarding process had begun for Emirates EK0570. Even though I had roughly 15 minutes before the boarding gates eventually closed, it was way better to be there earlier. Plagued with the classical Gate Lice situation, I had to weave through the passenger crowd as my boarding group was called, being seated at the tail end of the Emirates flight. With nothing to make a rush for, I wanted to relax on the last leg of my struggling journey with the larger footspace and lesser stuffiness at the twin seats. While I was briefly requested by a fellow passenger to swap seats for one of the more cramped seating regions, I respectfully declined their request as not only did the seat cost more, but I also really needed some rest on this flight.

Awkwardly enough, they had run into some trouble with the Emirates staff due to their seat-swapping request attempts, as I was the second person that they asked to swap with. After clearing up the boarding confusion, we took off from Dubai International Airport (DXB) at around 0130pm Gulf Standard Time, and we were soon provided with the health reporting self-declaration by the flight helpers right after. While my co-passenger left that to be done later, I wanted to get this out of the way so that I could finally get some undisturbed rest. While drifting into sleep and enjoying some flight meals at the break of dawn, the flight was finally closing in on Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport (CCU), and after a lengthy deboarding, I was back on the ground in my hometown of Kolkata, India.

Of course, I had to go through immigration here too - but as I had the health reporting self-declaration filled in advance, passing through with the immigration stamps on my passport was a breeze. While my fellow passengers struggled to find a writing surface at the arrival gates, I was glad that I did that even when I was just about to fall asleep on the Emirates flight. Right when I thought that my travel struggles were about to end, the luggage belt started its operation late at around 0830am Indian Standard Time, and I had to wait for almost an hour to obtain my checked-in luggage. Having not received an SMS notification, I also contemplated reaching out to the Emirates staff due to the abnormal duration, but not having to do that saved my return journey from getting any worse than it already had been.

I found the sunrays hitting my face at around 0430am Central European Summer Time on 16th June 2026, as I forgot to put the curtains on the night before. Being in the Northern Hemisphere, the cities of Czech Republic enjoyed longer durations of sunlight as compared to us living near the equatorial line. Even though I woke up a couple of hours before my scheduled alarm, I could state that I was gradually getting used to the time zone shift and the hotel bedding. As there were only two planned involvements for me on that day, i.e. Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session and Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 Contributor Recognition Awards Programme, I decided to have myself assigned to the registration duty for the first part of the day to ensure that I was able to be of assistance for however long I was present there.

After having a (slightly better) breakfast meal with Tomáš Hrčka and Cristian Le at around 0700am Central European Summer Time, Tomáš left early for a morning walk while Cristian and I decided to leave for the event venue a little while later. I got to know from him that he was planning on leaving for Brno that evening after the conference finished as we made it to Orea Hotel Andel Prague. Moving up from my designated slot with Michal Konecny, Cristian and I hung out at the front desk of the event. While we were not expecting many registrations at the tail end of the conference, we also had to be there as a source of information. I was also reached out to by Rajan Shah on WhatsApp, who was planning on visiting a Flock event for the first time before travelling on to attend DevConf.CZ 2026 in Brno.

Putting my work laptop on charge there and helping Cristian with a power bank, I saw Jennifer Schimmoller and Dorka Volavkova arriving at the registration desk. While helping Dorka bring the sweets from the International Candy Swap event to the main table, Jennifer swiftly onboarded me to the (very intuitive) Pretalx ticket scanning application. It was interesting to see just how the ecosystem application also provided the metadata information about what size of tee shirts I was tasked to offer to the attendees, thus lowering the entry barrier towards volunteering in conferences by quite a lot. We also faced a couple of exceptional cases there, with attendees requesting tee shirt switches due to incorrect sizes and incorrect status, both of which were handled by us volunteers present at the registration desk.

Even though we were almost certain that there would not be a lot of new check-ins on the third day, Jennifer still advised me to request folks who were seeking more tee shirts to return at around 0300pm Central European Summer Time. It would allow us to hand over the last ones to the longtime Fedora contributors for their (potentially possible) forward distribution in their respective regions. Placing the badge card ahead also got Maxwell G to reach out to me as the Fedora Badges service administrator, as the social event badge achievement had expired by then. While I did award him the badge achievement manually, I reactivated the specific invitation so that it would expire that midnight, as manually awarding those to almost hundreds of people after the event's end would not be a scalable solution.

At around 0900am Central European Summer Time, I met up with Jeremy Cline and Brian Exelbierd at the registration desk. Just like a lot of my Fedora Project friends, it was great to meet up with them after over a year since our previous chat during Flock To Fedora 2025. Amidst our discussions on our interactions with agentic tooling for software development and our frustrations related to business travel policies, I was surprised (read horrified) to notice that Brian (of all people) had somehow begun preparing slides for his presentations. While he was more than capable of "winging" the talk – an impressive quality that he had more than exhibited in the Fedora Project and at Red Hat for years – it was interesting to see how veterans like him also sought practice for the stage talk, every now and then.

The three of us also debated the use of agentic technologies among (mostly newer) engineers. I stated that the immediate utilization of generative tooling by incoming developers was much akin to young students' direct usage of calculators without ever starting by calculating on their fingers. He disagreed with the notion, stating that it does not matter whether a cook knew about the internals of a microwave oven or not, as long as they knew how to use it. We both eventually agreed on it being important for human developers to know what they wanted for them to be able to get there. Upon being joined by Jaroslav Řezník, I left for Kevin Fenzi's infrastructure presentation at around 1000am Central European Summer Time, while working with Jona Azizaj on the planned event of Fedora Mentor Summit.

She had to scrap the work done by Eduardo Javier Echeverria Alvarado on the slide deck to create a new one during the previous night. Through a brief spat with Michel Lind on the eligibility for obtaining the social event badge achievements, I took the feedback of potentially introducing newer ones that could also be received by our remote attendees. After another chat with Michael Scherer in the Sapphire room, we moved into the Topaz + Quartz shared room to attend the next couple of talks on Fedora Accessibility Test Days and Accelerating Microsoft Contributions To Fedora Project at around 1130am Central European Summer Time. Finishing up a chat with Artur Frenszek-Iwicki and Cristian, I finally met Rajan, whom I also invited to join us at the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026's Lunch And Learn Activity.

Offering the Forgejo Project's peel view for reviewing artwork asset differences during Emma's interactive presentation on Open Source Design Considerations, it was finally time for the lunch break at around 0100pm Central European Summer Time. With how Rajan had been leading DevConf.IN for the last couple of years, I knew that he was a reliable ally for the Fedora Project whenever we wanted to bring the community presence to India. Maybe we could have the next iteration in India? We never knew what the future had in store, but we did our best to make the most of Flock 2026's last day. After sharing lunch with him, Ankur Sinha and Michael, I was briefly pulled aside by Aoife Moloney for some schedule changes.

She wanted to reduce the effective duration of the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session by about fifteen minutes to squeeze in all the lightning talks. I was split on this as this was Fedora Mindshare's visible presence after many years, I also knew that fifteen more minutes would allow all the lightning talks to be covered. Being the session chair, I conditioned my approval by asking her to be highly strict with answering times so that we were able to keep the session as interactive as possible. After all, the Townhall Session was planned to be a pathway towards the intricate conversations after the event's proceedings. Being a means for folks to know more about the committee's charter after the recent election, I wanted for it to empower to organize more localized events and encourage ways to recognize contributions.

Finally, being seated at the Plenary Hall for the Lightning Talks at around 0200pm Central European Summer Time, I discovered that all the speakers did a great job of finishing their planned content on time. As I had a slide deck to present during the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session, I was extremely grateful when we ended up getting Ankur's laptop to present from. From the previous charter, only Emma and I were present there, while Matthew Holmes represented the incoming one on the stage. Helping set up the seats myself, we started off with a round of charter introductions before elaborating further on the progress made by the team during the previous term. As the Mindshare Representative to Fedora Council, I have had a statistical approach towards observing both our progress and our learnings.

The interactive session went well, with us taking feedback on what we could build on from Peter Boy's and Jef Spaleta's questions. Finishing this session at around 0315pm Central European Summer Time, I had a chat with Vít Smolík and Jonáš Hubený, who reflected on the rarity of the Stroopwafel achievement. Shockingly enough, not only did we have Justin Wheeler at the stage and Kevin seated in the front rows, but we were also joined by Adam Williamson – the three of whom were amazing (read crazy) enough to make the top cut. It was also impressive to see just how successful Vít had become in his contributions to the Fedora Project in a short period. At around 0400pm Central European Summer Time, we finally kicked off the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 Contribution Recognition Awards Programme.

With Jona kicking off the final session by marking the 2026 iteration as the fifth iteration of the Fedora Mentor Summit's proceedings, I took over soon after to explain how the process worked in the background. We were also grateful to Benson Muite, Cornelius Emase and the Nairobi GNU/Linux User Group, who got us laser-cut tangible trophies for the winners. Speaking of the winners, the three winners were Fabio Valentini, Justin Forbes and Ankur this time around, with the session attendees taking part in celebrating their recognition. This programme finally paved the way for the Closing Ceremony, and with the event finally brought to a successful closure by around 0430pm Central European Summer Time, it was time for farewells, goodbyes and forward travelling to DevConf.CZ 2026 too!

With some chat with the programme winners to congratulate them and with Adam to thank him for his continued work on the judging panel, Carol Chen gifted me an event souvenir from Finland. I also hung around for a little while longer to take pictures with Michael Winters (as he proudly called us, "The Data Guys" haha) and with Cornelius in his traditional wear. Dropping off my backpack at Ankur's room, since he was staying at the event venue, we planned to visit a drinking place called Beer Time. While it was just him and me initially, we were soon joined by Hristo Marinov, Christopher Klooz, Jeremy Cline, Emma Kidney, Jess Chitas, Matthew and many others. We marched to the next location and, following their suggestion, I also found myself having a sweet-tasting, enjoyable drink with limited alcohol.

After a couple of rounds of (250ml-sized) Van Honsebroucks and countless chats around the community and family, we decided that it was time for late dinner at around 0700pm Central European Summer Time. While we had to bid Cristian farewell as he had to leave for Brno, this additional time with our Fedora Project friends definitely allowed our community bonds to further deepen. On my advice, our collective soon found itself at the Old Hanoi restaurant – almost poetically finishing the Flock conference where it started. Amidst the continued tête-à-tête, I did find myself getting drowsier by the passing minute, so I had to leave at around 0830pm Central European Summer Time post having the Crispy Garlic Duck Dish so that I could get some rest before my long return flights home on the next day.

We also met with a couple of dining groups at the Old Hanoi restaurant, which seemed to have become a household name for the last couple of Flock events that we had in Prague – one with Matthew Miller and the Fedora Quality team folks, and the other with Jef, Aoife and Shaun. Making a stop at Ankur's room yet again for my travelling backpack, I also chanced upon David Duncan and Neal Gompa in the hotel lobby. Leaving the celebration collective at the Anděl crossing, I could not think of a better way to close the event's gathering, with me leaving for the Ibis Praha Mala Strana hotel to call it a night after around 0900pm Central European Summer Time and them continuing along the way. As I was not going DevConf.CZ, despite repeated requests from Hristo, I had to leave for Kolkata the next day.

Even though it was not as good a sleep as I would have gotten at my home, I ended up having a far better respite than the day before. Well rested as I was, I woke up at around 0600am Central European Summer Time on 15th June 2026 and had Tomáš Hrčka pick up the snacks and spices that I got for him from my hotel room. After all, the last thing I would want to do was haul them all the way to the venue only to hand them over to him so that he could bring them back to the hotel. He was grateful to have the Meat Masala and the Sabzi Masala that I got from Pune. I headed downstairs at Ibis Praha Mala Strana's dining area for breakfast with the likes of Lenka Segura and Cristian Le at around 0730am after hearing back from Michal Konecny about his possible delay in arriving at the event venue that day.

It was a fun conversation to know how Cristian had been a globe trotter just like another friend of ours, Matthew Holmes, and had been all over from Romania to Japan, and from Vietnam to the Czech Republic. I found it to be an interesting point of view to add to my experience of jumping countries only when I had to participate in or organize free and open source events around the globe. When it came to breakfast though, I found myself to be just as disappointed with the food choices as the day before, so I instead focused on the conversation about Lenka's talk on Forgejo Runners on that day. Sticking to barebones lettuce salad, a warm cappuccino and scrambled eggs allowed me to stay energized for the rest of the day, or until the Lunch And Learn Matching afternoon event at the very least.

Fetching our conference backpacks from our hotel rooms, the three of us marched to the conference venue. As we had checked in to the event on the day before, I had a quick chat with Jef Spaleta, checking on his keynote preparation, while he talked with me about Fedora Mindshare's proposed experiment of using a trusted service funding platform for sourcing/distributing event funding. We also touched base on the ratification of the responsibilities of representatives to the Fedora Council. It included two folks, one from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee and one from the Fedora Mindshare, and we agreed upon just how this had been entirely dependent on the representatives themselves so far. Having documentation could establish a baseline expectation for these liaison reps during their elected terms.

While Jef wanted to first understand the perspectives of the current liaisons, I emphasized just how important it is to have a documented baseline to begin from. As I was Fedora Mindshare's elected representative to the Fedora Council at that point in time, I remarked just how important it was to use the momentum to build the foundation that could then be iterated upon. After wishing him luck for his talk and sharing some Indian snacks with him, I moved away to chat with Tomáš. Since I was also part of the Fedora Council Townhall Session that was scheduled right after the keynote presentation, I knew that the second day was just as occupied for me as the first one. On Tomáš' (rather impromptu) request, I glanced through the draft post that conveyed the Pagure service retirement announcement, slated later.

With just how far Pagure had a reach as a general-purpose collaborative project hosting service, Tomáš chose to publish this on the Fedora Magazine. We wanted to provide a last-minute grace period for the straggling repositories before we rendered the Pagure service read-only for the foreseeable future. We wanted to avoid pushing back the decommissioning process until the end of the year 2026 and instead keep a local copy of the repositories that could be acquired on explicit request. After providing my approval, I went on to chat with Jona Azizaj inside the Plenary Hall about the Fedora Mentor Summit Contributor Recognition Awards announcement planning, and how it had to be done right before the Closing Notes were delivered by Justin Wheeler on the next day at the tail end of the conference.

Following Justin's quick event opening announcements, Jef followed through with his community and userbase metrics on the Fedora Project's growth since the last Flock To Fedora conference at around 0915am Central European Summer Time. I know how he worked with Michael Winters to attain those statistical findings, and this session was swiftly followed by the Fedora Council Strategic Proposals session at around 1000am Central European Summer Time. After a quick round of intros from the Council members, we addressed questions from attendees – both those who were attending in person and remotely. Finishing up with the session allowed me to connect with Carol Chen and Matthew again, with whom I shared some Indian snacks too, before being pulled aside by Cornelius Emase in his discussion.

During the coffee break, Cornelius and I briefly discussed the state of open source mentorship programmes with the rise of AI-assisted contributions. I looped Justin into the conversation as well, as the tireless low-quality contributions had finally pushed me into not wanting to participate as a formal mentor in free and open source software projects for the foreseeable future. My mentoring experience with the Fedora Badges Revamp Project had been the last straw, and it only made us mentors want to reinforce regulations around incessant AI tooling usage. While munching on the cookies, Justin also mentioned that he wanted to keep some time aside for having a conversation about my recent experience and discover pathways to prevent burnout occurring to selfless mentors in free and open source software.

We reflected on just how unfair it all had been - both for the applicants genuinely trying their best to make the cut and for the mentors wasting their human hours reviewing thoughtless contributions. Since Cornelius had continued to contribute to our community beyond his Outreachy mentoring participation cohort, I shared my appreciation for everything he did as a volunteer contributor. Carol joined in to cheer the conversation up as she shared just how hard her first formal mentoring experience would have been, had it not been for the likes of Justin and myself. Her Outreachy intern had been proactively participating in the mentoring programme even while using AI tooling, and that honestly felt like the correct pathway towards regular contributions to the Fedora Project, or any community for that matter.

At around 1130am Central European Summer Time, the townhall session for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee began. As compared to that of the Fedora Council's, a smaller number of elected members were able to make it to the event. I decided to volunteer as fallback session chair personnel while the Matrix chat was being handled by someone else. All I had to do was signal Aoife Moloney, who was hosting the Ask Me Anything Session, to inform her about the time left. This was followed by Stef Walter's fancy presentation on Fedora Linux Hummingbird Linux at around 1230pm Central European Summer Time. I finished the first half of the day with a lively chat with Ankur Sinha and Kashyap Chamarthy around Two Factor Authentication Enablement for effectively securing the packager workflow.

Just like the day before, Michael Scherer and Ankur decided to help Jona and me out with the Lunch And Learn Matching social event. I was glad to note that our move to the earlier partition helped significantly as we eventually ended up having more folks. The topics on that day were Interpersonal Skills, Packaging, Events, and Infrastructure. I invited Stef and his associate into the event as well, and Kevin Fenzi followed soon after. Jona and I went around the tables to click photographs and to inform folks about the Fedora Badges, they could get when they scanned the QR code on the printed menu. Since Michael could not join the interactive workshop on Fedora Badges on the previous day, he was greatly impressed when I shared with him what the staging Fedora Badges deployment looked like at lunch.

Once we were able to establish a respectable presence at the dining tables, Jona, Ankur, and I finally decided to get something to eat. The queue had subsided by that time, and we could calmly march out with our food plates. After a brief chat with Jiri Konecny, who barely arrived at the event just that afternoon, I wished him well for his onward journey to DevConf.CZ 2026. We chanced upon Debarshi Ray in the queue as well, and finishing up a (much improved from the day before) meal allowed us to head into Lenka's talk on Forgejo Runners. I tried my best to salvage the presentation progress, which was dreadfully haunted with intermittent audio video issues. While acting as the microphone runner, I also diagnosed the audio reception by checking in with the remote attendees on the Matrix chat.

As there were a pair of wireless microphones in the Sapphire room, passing one over to Lenka allowed her to have a more hands-on approach with the talk. To add to that, it also helped improve the voice reception since the microphone on the podium was having issues. What baffled me to no end was that the scheduled talk at 0200pm Central European Summer Time managed to "rickroll" all of the folks, both in-person and remote ones - Well played, Lenka haha! Ankur and I headed in the talk on The EU CRA vs Community by Jaroslav Řezník and Roman Zhukov at around 0230pm Central European Summer Time. In the little time before the talk began, Carol reflected on how 2026 was her first time attending the Flock event, even though she usually visited many conferences and events around the globe.

Besides Michael's chat on how the Fedora Mindshare's proposed experiment had previously had auditing challenges, I decided to onboard Carol into my grand plan for the Fedora Project's APAC presence at FOSSAsia 2027. That made her the next person I reached out to, apart from jokingly mentioning it once to Cristian, who also belonged to the APAC region. As I said during the Fedora Council Townhall Session, I felt that it was crucial to meet the community members where they were and hence, intra-regional travel was a logistically feasible and cost-effective way. I spent the remaining time of the session taking notes on the policy exchange, while talking with the audio video engineering personnel to attempt fixing the YouTube livestream that broke due to the inadvertent swapping of the streaming keys.

I was informed by the engineering staff that applying corrective measures would require the livestream to be stopped. I advised them not to do so, at least until the session was finally over, as that would be an effectively less destructive method to resolve the issue. Thankfully, Gregory Sutcliffe jumped right in to swap the stream names, thereby providing an expedient workaround for the same that did not need us to stop the livestreaming then. After a Matrix chat with Michael, I slipped out at around 0330pm Central European Summer Time to discuss with him on how we could join forces in leveraging the Project Hatlas into discovering useful Fedora Badges. For a conversation that was supposed to last for thirty minutes or so, we did not realize how more than an hour had already passed by in the blink of an eye.

While the initial conversations were about how the Fedora Data Work Group and the Fedora Badges Revamp Project could help each other, we delved deeper into what ideas drive each of us towards contributing selflessly to free and open source software communities. I remarked on just how his hands-on approach towards solving effective community health metrics allowed the community to trust him with what he did and the approaches he took to get there. He also shared a great deal of informative resources that guided his core ideas and his motivation to keep pushing on with Project Hatlas. Upon deciding to connect later on the actual topic, I found myself (quite literally) swiftly ambushed by Jean-Baptiste Holcroft and Michael, who wanted to pick my brains on their needs with Fedora Messaging.

They wanted to understand just how easy (read, difficult) it would be to import retroactively about 14.6 million event messages into the Fedora Messaging service by implementing the webhook support for the Weblate platform. To make matters worse, he also wanted Fedora Badges to be awarded based on the events from these many messages. Given the limitations of the application platform, we had to write a one-shot script to process these requests retroactively first before resuming the automated consumption of messages using the webhook support. It most likely was not an easy task to achieve, but as I wanted to help him out with the same, I requested that an issue ticket be created with Fedora Infrastructure so that it could be investigated further and developed upon once we got back from the conference.

Justin quickly dropped in to provide information on the social event, which was to begin 0600pm Central European Summer Time onwards. After finishing the chat on adding approximately 14.6 million messages to the count of 3.5% of the stored Datanommer messages, I had a quick followup with Justin and Michael. I was also able to provide some snacks to both Matthew Miller and Justin when we were just about to leave for the Manifesto Culture Zone Prague for the Flock To Fedora 2026 Official Party. Joined by Carol, our group walked from the event venue, and after a quick round of instructions from Dorka Volavkova and receiving some meal coupons with the drinks, I was seated in a dedicated area with Sarah Julia Kriesch, Michael, Carol, and two more attendees, enjoying starter meals and soft drinks.

With the upper limit of 400 CZK on the meal coupon and a wide variety of cuisines to try out, the official party ended up being quite the culinary experience for us all. Do not get me wrong though - I surely miss being on a cruise boat like the previous time, but this felt like an equivalent tradeoff for someone like me who was easy to please. I stepped out along with Toshio Kuratomi, Carol, and Michael to find some bites for dinner. Being the indecisive folks that we were, Carol and I finally settled for Korean food while Michael got himself an Italian dish. While we were offered a refund for the remaining amount of the coupon price, we declined and were even offered a grape-flavoured soft drink as an appreciative gesture. I fairly struggled wondering how they ran their business with such amazing selfless thoughtfulness.

After informing the organizing committee about a potential mishap, we returned to our tables to have our dining fills. With Toshio sharing with me about new folks coming for the Dancing With Toshio Fedora Badges achievement and a little chat with Michael, the two of us were called back in by Justin and Shaun for a round of commemorative photographs. The three of us went for some gelato after the photo shoot was done, and I settled for a double scoop of raspberry and mango in a dark-coloured edible cone. This is where I met up with Nicolas Chauvet and Dominik Mierzejewski, striking chat on the Fedy project for installing third-party software applications from RPM Fusion repositories. I was surprised that he did remember my progress on the (now deprecated) NVIDIA Auto Installer for Fedora Linux.

Carol checked in with me on whether or not I wanted to leave, and as it was getting darker, it was not that bad of an idea to leave soon. As much as I wanted to stay back for a little while longer, at 0900pm Central European Summer Time - I was better off preparing for the next day of the Flock event. After finishing off the chat with the two and sharing this magical full circle moment with Justin, Carol and I walked back to the Anděl crossing before going our separate ways. I briefly came back to TESCo at around 0930pm Central European Summer Time to purchase some items for my family and friends. Deciding not to extend my activity longer, I headed back to Ibis Praha Mala Strana after around an hour to rest up and prep for the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session that I had scheduled on the next day.

Unlike the Flock To Fedora 2025 event proceedings, the workshops were planned to be frontloaded into the conference this time. As there were no presentations or townhalls on the first day, it also meant that there was no live streaming on our YouTube channel either. Heading to bed a little early the day before was the right thing to do, as that allowed me to wake up at around 0500am Central European Summer Time on 14th June 2026. Of course, the jet lag prevented me from getting proper respite, but still it was better than nothing at all. After one last look at the slide decks for the (newly created) Fedora Forge Progress Update and the (FOSSAsia-intentioned) Fedora Badges Revamp Project, I uploaded them on the Pretalx platform for them to be available to both in-person and remote attendees.

While I had Tomáš Hrčka's help for the former, I had to drive the latter by myself since Chris Onoja Idoko could not make it to the conference this time. I also found it an amusing observation that while the Fedora Badges Revamp Project was scheduled as the last presentation for FOSSAsia 2026, the workshop on the same topic was planned as the first workshop for Flock To Fedora 2026. As it was scheduled for 0900am Central European Summer Time, I had to ensure that I had the venue's audio/video setup configured properly for my purposes. On meeting the likes of Frantisek Lachman and Michal Konecny at the breakfast table at around 0700am Central European Summer Time, we shared conversations about contemporary governance and technological innovations around the world.

Michal and I left for the venue at around 0800am Central European Summer Time after a quick trip back to our rooms to fetch our conference backpacks, because we anticipated the early crowd to be denser at the registration desk with the attendees rolling in swiftly. Amidst meeting up with a bunch of familiar faces during our short walk to the event venue, I could not shake the familiar feeling of attending the Flock event at the same place and at nearly the same time as the previous year. Unlike the last time, I did not assume that I would automatically get registered when my proposals got selected, and that led the registration check to go smoothly. Meeting up with Dorka Volavkova at events had always been a pleasure, especially even more so when she promptly helped out with the venue's audio/video setup.

Running into the likes of Kevin Fenzi and Alexander Bokovoy in the hallway track did lead to some interesting community conversations, but I decided to keep those short to be present in the Opal room and prepare my distributable apparatus of sticky notes and sketch pens that I flew in all the way from Kolkata for this usage. Since the event venue provided multiple thin-sized A4 notebooks and rolling ballpoint pens at the attendee seats, all I had to do was provide the sticky notes for the hands-on activity on the heuristic user experience evaluation. After wishing Hristo Marinov the best, as even he was running an interactive workshop at the same time although in a different room, I found attendees gradually arriving at the Opal room for my workshop by around 0915am Central European Summer Time.

I realized that I had to manage the workshop's cadence on the move to ensure that I was addressing both the folks who had been there from the beginning and those who were just joining after some time. As I wanted to respect the time of the three folks - Vittorio Cioe, Jonáš Hubený, and Vít Smolík - who decided to join, I kicked off the workshop session then while recapping for the joining folks whenever we had them dropping in every now and then. My intuition to front-load the years-long backstory of the revamp initiative was on point, as it made little to no sense to start off the interactive parts with just three people attending. While I explained the architecture of the project system and the progress of the efforts through the multiple years, the attendee number increased from just three to over fifteen.

It was the right time to begin handing out the sticky notes, all while revealing the staging instance of the Fedora Badges deployment to the community. Gauging the individual awareness of the project also helped me cater specifically to those who did not know much about it but were deeply engrossed in learning. Since I had to cover the design modernization too, I blended superficial experience with technical talks, all while giving folks the time to provide feedback on the overall experience. While folks like Matthew Miller, Matthew Holmes, Justin Wheeler, Jona Azizaj, Cornelius Emase, and Ankur Sinha added to the activity as longtime volunteers, I also got feedback from interested newcomers to Fedora Badges like Shawn Dunn, Emmanuel Seyman, Guillermo Leiro, Misia Mary, Vittorio, Jonáš, Vit and more.

Matthew even mentioned handing over the ecosystem Discourse syncing script that integrated the achievements from the Fedora Badges backend into the Fedora Discussion platform. I was also helped with brilliant photography by Jakub Jelen and Misia, who took care of the entire event's photography efforts. The lenient ask of using either a mobile phone or a laptop computer to access the staging service also allowed me to obtain more involved feedback that I was able to take back to Aurelien Bompard and Shounak Dey. The second half of the interactive session became more involved, and I ended up overshooting the designated time by ten minutes or so. As there had been a twenty-minute-long break planned between the one-hour-and-forty-minute-long workshops, that was not really a deal breaker.

While I did not necessarily eat into someone else's designated time, I barely had about ten minutes to take a resting breath before heading back into the Sapphire room. If you can believe it - not only, did I have two workshops to organize on that day, but those were also scheduled in succession. With Tomáš being surprised that his HDMI support on Fedora Linux Asahi Remix was working flawlessly, I made it into the room at around 1055am Central European Summer Time. This was also a whole lot more packed with folks than the previous one, so the two of us decided to start five minutes after the designated time. If I had to attribute why there were relatively more folks here than in the previous workshop, a small part of it would be the scheduled time, but a large part had to do with the significant relevance.

Being a critical initiative for the last couple of years in the Fedora Project, we were now heading into the Dist Git service aspect and were planning on rendering the Pagure service read-only. I spent the first half sharing the progress updates since the previous year's Flock event before handing it over to Tomáš for the plans for the Dist Git migration development. I made it a point to inform attendees on the housekeeping aspects, continuous integration, private issues, migration progress, learning pathways, and community involvement with due credit. That helped us take advantage of the attendees being present there in person for interactivity. The reception was a lot better than the previous year, with the folks participating not only in the hands-on updates but also in the future plans of the critical initiative.

We encouraged the attendees to pause us in between to ask questions or convey concerns as they felt like it. Sure enough, we had discussions around the potential private branches feature from Justin Forbes, the lookaside cache technological implementation from Miro Hroncok, the forced-pushing prevention policy from Fabio Valentini, the possible Pagure documentation change from David Duncan, the Pagure sunsetting service action from Ankur, the Forgejo Actions trigger config from Frantisek, the potential Bugzilla replacement development from Kevin, and other things. Even though there were a lot of talks to do, the workshop interactions felt well-spaced in a way that could be absorbed in the notes that I was taking along the way to share with the team members who could not attend the event.

The neighbouring discussions also included concerns about the support for the Packager Dashboard, the templating of project repositories to include the files for European Union Cyber Resilience Act Stewardship, the need for SSH access for Dist Git project repositories, the methods for conveying the archival state of the source repositories, and other areas. Finishing off the workshop at around 1245pm Central European Summer Time, my involvements continued at the dining area with the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026's Lunch And Learn Matching. Ankur also decided to accompany me in helping out with the organization, and we headed to the lunch area to meet with Shaun McCance and Jona, who were helping prepare the tables for the folks to discuss various topics, all while enjoying delicious food.

On Shaun's expedient advice, we used the whiteboard to draw the attendee crowd towards us, while detailing the topics scoped for discussions on that day. On the fifth year of the Fedora Mentor Summit event, we departed from the need for pre-dated registration for the Lunch And Learn Matching and opened it up to everyone at the conference. This not only allowed for greater participation along the way, but we were also able to curate the involvement based on the selected topics for the three days. Take, for instance, the topics for that day: Documentation, Operations, Development, and Marketing. In a community where everyone is both a mentor and a mentee, anyone could join any table they desired to share what they have or learn from the others, thus making meaningful connections at an in-person event.

Astonishingly enough, it was mostly down to Jona and me at the event to run the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 proceedings, as many of the helping folks could not make it to Flock To Fedora 2026. We decided to get seated ourselves after setting up the table presences with the likes of Hristo, Kevin, Cornelius, and Ankur with their interested topics. I also suggested to Jona that he take the first separated dining segment from the next day onwards to be able to catch attendees right after they had taken their plates, since the Pretalx platform mistakenly noted that the social event was taking place in the Sapphire room. Also, offering a distinct Fedora Badge allowed us to pull in more folks to our little event, and we were able to close the lunch event as a success by around 0145pm Central European Summer Time.

This also meant that I had no more scheduled obligations for the day - some free time that I used to catch up with the likes of Michael Scherer and Carol Chen after a year or so, since I did not visit FOSDEM that year. Paired up with Ankur now, the two of us headed into the Fedora Data & Analytics Workshop, which was chaired by Michael Winters at around 0200pm Central European Summer Time. Honestly, it was rather impressive to see just how he was able to use the Datanommer store in building a Data Lakehouse that could potentially answer question on effective community health metrics. He even detailed my previous attempts at generating the activity information that I worked on ages ago, called Fedora Contributor or User Activity Statistics, and how he built the first prototype of the Hatlas Project.

The interactive workshop also detailed a variety of data-related infrastructure tools that he made use of and our frustrations with the synchronously built Datagrepper API for fetching information. With Jef Spaleta and Matthew working to fetch data for the Fedora Project Leader Keynote to be presented on the next day, that also involved a bunch of technical debugging and agentic development. Following the closing of that workshop and meeting with Michael on Fedora Badges, Ankur and I headed next into Ellis Low's interactive workshop on Do-It-Yourself AI: Build a Private Customizable Chatbot on Lean Hardware at around 0400pm Central European Summer Time. While the presenter suggested building the projects from source, Ankur and I realised that both of them were packaged in Fedora Linux.

We suggested the use of the officially updated llama-cpp and whisper-cpp packages on Fedora Linux while competing on CPU-bound build times and running lighter hardware models. Strangely enough, at around this time, I found myself banned inadvertently by the automated moderation from one of the Flock To Fedora 2026 Matrix rooms after posting photographs from the event to serve the remote folks, since the workshop proceedings were not live streamed on that day. I was startled, but the banning action was immediately rectified by Steve Cosette, who helped us by remotely moderating the chatrooms manually. We also ran the Docs2DB project locally on our laptops from the PyPI source, and it was impressive to see just how the documentation database could be queried as if it were an expensive chatbot.

I appreciated the deeper focus on decentralizing artificial intelligence workloads and the greater emphasis on running models on local hardware. While Ellis did acknowledge the potential shortcomings of CPU inferencing, the advantages found in data security far outweighed the possible frustrations with slower task. The first day of the event's proceedings was done by 0600pm Central European Summer Time, and I realized that I barely had a few minutes to make it to the lobby for a group dinner with my colleagues from the Red Hat Community Linux Engineering Team. After meeting the ever disciplined and always punctual Fedora Quality Assurance Team at the venue lobby, we marched towards the dining place soon, as we wanted to be back at the venue for the International Candy Swap event too.

I caught up with the likes of Adam Williamson, Kamil Paral, Kashyap Chamarthy, and Lukas Ruzicka, and after being joined by Lenka Segura and Michal, we finally made it to the restaurant. As luck would have it, even this ended up being an Asian place like the day before, but I honestly did not have any complaints with that. Following Tomáš' meal advice from the day before on the dish, and after a chat on the introductory mails for the sysadmin-main incoming membership with Kevin, we departed for the venue again at around 0700pm Central European Summer Time for the International Candy Swap event. Michal and I had to run back to Ibis Praha Mala Strana first to fetch our event offerings, but we were able to rush back to the celebration place right when the introductions were barely about to kick off.

Making a note of the potential allergens and origin introductions for my delicious haul on the paper piece, we went around the table with those discussions. For the hard candies of flavours like Orange, Guava, Mango, Lychee, Tamarind, and Coffee that I flew in all the way from Kolkata, I feared that I might have overdone those additions to the already massive toothache variety. Since Michal and I were stuffed from the team dinner, we had to be extremely choosy with what we tried tasting. I was accompanied by Christopher Klooz, Artur Frenszek-Iwicki, Kacper Skrzyński, Matthew, Ankur, and Emi for the tasting trials before finding a nearby table for a round of Michal's board game, Cyanide and Happiness: Trial By Trolley. We took turns playing the train driver and made comically difficult choices for scoring high.

After being briefly joined by Matthew and Justin at the game table, I found myself getting sleepier by the passing minute, so I decided to call it quits after the first couple of games. I realized that I was struggling to get adequate sleep anyway, and the last thing I would want to do then was to deprive myself of what was duly deserved. I struck a chat with Jona about the planning of the next day's Fedora Mentor Summit proceedings, all while following Justin's advice in getting small pieces of regional candies I wanted to fly back home for my family and friends. I decided to head back to my hotel right after bidding everyone farewell at around 1030pm Central European Summer Time and attempt to catch some shut eye to see just how successful I would end up being after the super eventful first day.

My onwards journey began at around 0600pm Indian Standard Time on 12th June 2026 when I departed for the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport (CCU) in Kolkata. After my longstanding troubles with the travel agency, I was able to rebook the previously cancelled connecting flight from Dubai (DXB) to Prague (PRG). When I thought that I was finally out of the woods, my backpack was weighed at the Emirates desk for the first time. While my check-in luggage was well under the weight limit of 25 kilograms, my backpack ended up weighing a little more than 7 kilograms. Upon my declining to move my electronics into the check-in luggage, as that would have ended up being a safety hazard, I was finally able to make it to the immigration gates at around 0700pm Indian Standard Time.

Although the Fast Track Immigration Trusted Travellers' Programme would have helped me cut through the moderately occupied passenger queue, I decided to join the manual queue anyway as the digital kiosk wanted me to have my biometric entries registered in advance. Imagine having to verify your identity after doing so multiple times with the passport verification and visa registration! After a quick discussion about the requirements with the immigration staff, I was able to breeze through the security checks quite swiftly. With the first leg of my onwards journey, Emirates EK0573, departing at around 0900pm Indian Standard Time, I had about an hour before boarding began. To my surprise, it did start early at around 0750pm Indian Standard Time after I was done chatting with my family members.

Given that I had a dreadfully arduous eight-hour layover period ahead of me at Dubai International Airport (DXB), I initially planned on catching some sleep on the flight itself. Amidst munching on the served dinner and watching Oshi No Ko (2023), I had limited success with resting my eyes as the onwards flight moved closer to the first stop. As there was no hurry to make it to the next flight, I went for one of the twin seats at the very end of the aircraft, 50K. Chatting with my fellow passenger and dozing off right after, I did not realize how quickly the five hours passed, and I found myself landing at Dubai International Airport (DXB) at around 12:00am Gulf Standard Time. Unfortunately, my first flight did not land directly at the terminal gates and, hence, we had to board the transit bus instead.

It took around 30 to 40 minutes for the buses to get us to Terminal 3, and after a rather uneventful security check, I was back indoors. The time it took to get to the terminal gates helped me realize just how massive the area was - or conversely, just how slowly our transit bus was moving. I did not have any complaints as I had nothing to do for the eight-hour-long wait before my second leg kicked off. While I initially planned on getting myself a sleeping pod, I eventually decided to find myself a reclining area to sleep in near the silent area of Gate B26. After building rudimentary security for my travelling backpack so that I would get tugged awake in the rare occurrence of someone attempting to pull it away from me, I decided to try catching up on some sleep. Of course, you know just how it must have gone...

Those eight hours felt like eternity as I kept zoning in and out of my sleep state while the night grew darker and colder with the passing of time. In retrospect, I should have carried some warm clothing, which I ended up skipping this time because the summer season had me confused. But it felt a whole lot safer amidst a bunch of travellers struggling to catch some sleep, rather than being somewhere alone. The moment I was just about to catch some shut eye, I was nudged awake by a helpful person who thought I was waiting for the flight to Delhi departing at around 0355am Gulf Standard Time. While they apologized after I told them about my situation, I thanked them for their well-intentioned, caring gesture towards ensuring that their (potentially possible) fellow passenger was not left behind.

After about an hour of trying to sleep again, I eventually gave up on my attempts at around 0630am Gulf Standard Time and instead decided to browse the Dubai Duty Free Stores. As my flight was departing from Gate B31, that would mean that I could also slowly start moving towards the departure gate too. I also wanted to get something for my family and friends from there because I would be unable to do so on my way back with a layover of just 90 minutes. Using the public WiFi at the international airport behind a secure VPN allowed me to connect with my brother over a WhatsApp call. After making a couple of purchases for the house warming, I finally made it to the departure gate, where I could simply get to the second flight without queuing as the boarding had already begun by that time.

This time around too, I had to board a transit bus that took us from the terminal gates to Emirates EK0139, and even that took long. That explained to me why the boarding had begun sooner, as they had to compensate for the travelling time to the actual flight as well. Seated at 44K, I had a small talk with a fellow traveller from the Philippines while I tried to plug my work laptop into the power outlets. I also noticed a lot of travellers from East Asia flying into Prague, which was mostly an interesting observation to make. After multiple failed attempts at getting some power to my work laptop—even after using the plug converters offered by the flight stewardesses—I eventually had to stow it into my travelling backpack. That meant that I had to discover other ways to keep myself occupied for the next seven hours!

I knew that sleep had become quite the exorbitant affair at that point, and while I clearly needed some, there was no way in which I could have gotten it given just how the timezone shift had affected my internal biology. I continued chatting with the (rather overprepared) Philippines traveller, who had a full-blown travelling kit, all while continuing to watch Oshi No Ko (2023). Just like the fellow passenger from the first flight, I helped her with some pictures from the airplane window too. When it came to the meals, I intentionally kept it lightweight and strictly avoided alcoholic liquor to ensure that I was well hydrated. In between keeping myself entertained and zoning out of consciousness, I soon found myself nearing Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) at around 0100pm Central European Summer Time.

With zero transit buses to catch, as we landed directly at the arrival gates, I left for the automated immigration registration kiosks after bidding my fellow passengers farewell. There were manual checks too, which got expedited due to the presence of these automated border check kiosks, and I was able to pass through the massive queue in just about 20 minutes or so. As I observed that the passengers from East Asia were struggling with the language choices, I decided to stay back a little to help them pick the correct language using nothing but gestures to connect. While I initially planned on purchasing a Czech Republic SIM card from there, I decided to get to the hotel first because it had been 24 hours since I had left home, and some rest after checking in would do wonders in helping my body recover.

Using Uber's automated digital kiosk to book a rented cab and the public WiFi for authorization purposes, I was finally able to get to the Ibis Praha Mala Strana hotel by about 0200pm Central European Summer Time. This was the same hotel where I stayed the last time too, and it was just convenient to stay at a location which was barely a couple of minutes away from the event venue. I got in touch with the likes of Michal Konecny and Tomáš Hrčka after checking into Room 401, all while checking in with the likes of Kevin Fenzi and Justin Wheeler. One of the first things I worked on as I waited for Michal and Tomáš to become available was ensuring that the staging Fedora Badges deployment was working correctly, as I wanted to use that as an apparatus for experiments in the workshop the next day.

I witnessed my plans of getting some rest turn to blazing ashes before my eyes as I stepped out to meet Michal, who had just checked in at around 0300pm Central European Summer Time. We moved on to have a late lunch at an Asian restaurant in the Nový Smíchov Shopping Centre's food court, all while catching up after almost a year since meeting in person. Surprisingly enough, we ran into Aoife Moloney when we went downstairs into the TESCo supermarket to purchase some cold drinks. As Michal purchased some cookies to share during the International Candy Swap Event, I kept an eye out for SIM cards to purchase. I was lucky to find a Vodafone kiosk right after exiting TESCo, and I ended up getting one without even having to share my personal details or passport information, for that matter.

With my connectivity restored, Michal and I quickly visited the hotel to drop our things before heading out to the event venue. While the event venue had remained the same from the previous year, the institution got renamed from Vienna House Andel Prague to OREA Hotel Andel Prague due to the management change. Much akin to a corridor conversation during FOSDEM events, the two of us met up with Hristo Marinov, whom we caught up with before running into Emma Kidney at the same place too. Amidst the talks about Forgejo Runners for Fedora Atomic and heading to Brno for DevConf.CZ 2026, our circle became bigger with the joining of Lenka Segura and Tomáš. As I wanted to join Tomáš to prepare for the Fedora Forge interactive workshop the next day, I quickly left for the conference venue.

While there was nothing significant to be done at the event venue on that day as the event was starting the next day, going there definitely gifted us Clement Verna, with whom I was meeting again after almost three years. Leaving Hristo to have a chat with him after a swift introduction to the Fedora CoreOS team members, Michal and I ran into Daniel Mellado and Fernando Fernandez Mancera at an adjacent cafeteria. Since I could not visit the FOSDEM 2026 event, I was meeting them again after almost a year as well since the previous Flock event. After a quick chat with Kacper Skrzyński, the two of us went into a nearby bookstore as Michal wanted to redeem a discount coupon while buying two volumes of the Chainsaw Man (2018) manga at around 0500pm Central European Summer Time.

Coincidentally enough, we met up with Tomáš again at the Anděl crossing and, with Michal heading back to the hotel, Tomáš and I moved through Nový Smíchov Shopping Centre to make our way into the green hills behind it. With just how tucked in it was behind the low-height concrete structures, it was surprising how he knew about the location in the first place. Visiting a densely vegetated park area also reminded me of us doing the same thing about a year back, although that was a different location and we had more folks around. The peaceful ambience of the green zone allowed us to work on the workshop preparations all while catching up on our conversations. Even though I initially planned on demonstrating the private issues feature, I ultimately ended up scrapping it in favor of more interaction.

Tomáš' initial dining plans with the Fedora Quality team members did not come to fruition as they seemed to have gone for food already. After some more visits to the Nový Smíchov Shopping Centre to purchase some mineral water, the two of us headed over to a nearby quaint Vietnamese-themed restaurant called Old Hanoi at around 0700pm Central European Summer Time. With some delicious bites after the dry meat I had on the incoming flight, and even more fun conversations, this felt like the right way to kick off the next three days of community celebrations at Flock To Fedora 2026. I had already been running on fumes while being awake for almost over 30 hours by that time, so I decided to call it a day a little early at around 0830pm Central European Summer Time to get some well-deserved rest.

Here is the list of sessions that I participated in during Flock To Fedora 2026, which was organized from June 14th 2026 to June 16th 2026 in Prague, Czechia.

Fedora Badges Revamp Project Progress Update

Metadata

• Verdict: Rejected
• Location: Unavailable
• Schedule:
  • Undefined
• Submitters:
  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Shounak Dey
• Type:
  • Short presentation
    25 minutes
• Themes:
  • Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora's Future
  • Welcoming New Voices: Pathways for Fedora Contributors
  • Driving Innovation: Fedora and Emerging Technologies
• Complexity:
  • Beginner
    Anyone can follow along without previous context
• Resource:
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/VQ87RYXJJCBYGK39XAKQX8CMZHGF7SXZ

Abstract

How do you replace the engine of a moving car? Or better yet, how do you replace the heart of a living human? For decades, Fedora Badges has been a crucial partner for gamifying contributor engagement, but its ageing frontend technologies and backend infrastructure were becoming unmaintainable. This talk dives into the multi-year project to completely revamp Fedora Badges, piece by piece, while having it run just fine with sustainably equivalent feature parity. We will explore the transition from a legacy system to a modern architecture with our move from synchronous backend libraries like Flask to asynchronous backend libraries like FastAPI and from static templating systems like Jinja to progressive interface frameworks like React.

Particulars

• Identifying technical debt and associated risks of maintaining legacy systems past their end-of-support timeline
• Why we moved on to a modern stack centered around asynchronous processing and progressive application
• Moving code was not hard, moving data was - Complexities and learnings of the runtime active migration procedure
• Evolving system administration from legacy centered virtual machines to cloud native OpenShift deployments
• Demonstration and interactions of the live deployment of Fedora Badges, with the plans for further development
• Interactive feedback from the participants on both the backend infrastructure and frontend technologies

Takeaways

• Strategies for tackling massive technical debt acquired through years in established open source projects
• Real world lessons on live migration of databases and tooling using examples from Fedora Infrastructure
• Understanding the benefits of modern stack for community tooling and onboarding community contributors
• Balancing technical innovation with community continuity - You can revamp, but should you revamp?
• Encouragement and retention of voluntary contributors through gamifying aspects of community activities
• Strategies for ensuring the longevity of the project codebase by working with various community disciplines

References

• Update on Fedora Badges Revamp Project - https://gridhead.net/update-on-fedora-badges-revamp-project/
• Tahrir - Fedora Infrastructure - GitHub - https://github.com/fedora-infra/tahrir
• #badges-team topics on Fedora Discussions - Discourse - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/badges-team
• Fedora Badges - Advanced Reconnaissance Crew - https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/badges/index.html
• Discourse as frontend for Fedora Badges - Discourse - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/so-we-investigated-discourse-to-confirm-if-it-is-worthy-of-be...
• Getting Fedora Badges Back in Shape - Discourse - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/getting-fedora-badges-back-in-shape/42942

Fedora Badges Revamp Project - Design and Development Workshop

Metadata

• Verdict: Accepted
• Location: Opal hall, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
• Schedule:
  • 14th June 2026, 0900am - 1040am CEST
• Submitters:
  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Chris Onoja Idoko
• Type:
  • Workshop / BoF
    1.8 hours
• Themes:
  • Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora's Future
• Complexity:
  • Beginner
    Anyone can follow along without previous context
• Resource:
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/HUXM7JYBFJMRUMDQXVBWPCBYD9XENEM3

Abstract

How do you replace the engine of a moving car while simultaneously replacing its paintjob? For over a decade, Fedora Badges has been the cornerstone of gamifying contributions and engaging achievements. However, as we head into 2026, the project faces a double deficit: crippling technical debt on the backend, and a trust problem regarding undeployed modern artwork redesigns.

Our hybrid session dives into the multi year perspective of the Fedora Badges Revamp Project and the artwork design mentoring initiative. In the first half, we will explore the live migration of legacy synchronous systems to a modern application stack, on a staging environment. In the second half, we will find ourselves leveraging the Forgejo Migration to get redesigned artworks online.

This “Design To Deploy Sprint” takes advantage of the recent aggressive move away from Fedora Pagure to Fedora Forge, to finally integrate our lost modern style guidelines into the upcoming Fedora Badges revamp. Thus, emerging from our past coordination disconnects to not just move code and data, but evolve the reward system that unmistakably, establishes the Fedora Project brand.

Questions

• Primary question: How can we simultaneously modernize the legacy Fedora Badges system for the Fedora Forge era while designing modern gamification incentives to revitalize various subprojects and SIGs?
• Engagement question: How do we retroactively honor the modern badge artwork redesigns to restore the trust among the community designers while keeping up with the evolving requirements of the communities?

Relevance

• Experience sharing: Understanding the user personas interacting with the Fedora Badges service platform, their happinesses and their pain points, to find targets to pursue and potentially improve.
• Coordination healing: To openly acknowledgement the disconnection and discover ways to ensure that the efforts do not go unnoticed and time does not go sidelined due to more pressing affairs.
• Tangible progress: To give a milestone update to the community about the engineering progress and design efforts - all while setting the community expectations on the project’s future.
• End-to-end onboarding: To produce a verified batch of production-ready artwork and provide a hands-on experience to the attendees so that they can immediately start contributing to the design.

Methodology

• Part 1 - The Engine (Technical walkthrough)
  • Identifying the potential risks of continually maintaining legacy systems and finding reasons to modernize the stack
  • Recognizing the complexities of the migrating data and evolving service system administration to cloud-native deployments
  • Interacting with the staging environment and discussing on balancing technical innovations with community continuity
• Part 2 - The Paintjob (Design modernization)
  • Reviewing the legacy guidelines against the modern ones and capitalizing on the Forgejo migration for the artwork overhaul
  • Collaborating with the attendees to create/refine existing badge artworks using the modern artwork design guidelines
  • Uploading the refined badges design artwork to demonstrate the roadmap for the replacing legacy badges artwork process

Forging Fedora Project's Future With Forgejo

Metadata

• Verdict: Accepted
• Location: Sapphire hall, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
• Schedule:
  • 14th June 2026, 1100am - 1240pm CEST
• Submitters:
  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Tomas Hrcka
• Type:
  • Workshop / BoF
    1.8 hours
• Themes:
  • Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora's Future
• Complexity:
  • Intermediate
    Some background knowledge/context is required
• Resource:
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/UGZ9KQXDHNX7ZURGENPH3VMZQCMBJ93U

Abstract

Fedora Project is undergoing significant infrastructure changes that affect everyone from distribution users to individual contributors - that is, migrating from Pagure to Forgejo as its primary Git forge for both source code and package sources. Our talk chronicles the journey from the early days of collective debating between GitLab and Forgejo with Fedora Council, through the ongoing migration of thousands of repositories with Fedora Infrastructure.

While the initiative began due to the need to move away from Pagure, it gradually evolved into one that also aimed at fixing the long-standing pain points faced with workflows. We got the opportunity to streamline the processes that made sense about a decade back, and have since then, slowly started getting in the way of contribution. This also allowed us to contribute back to the Forgejo upstream with the features that would end up benefiting all.

This workshop aims to progress along with the work that we have been up to so far with creating solutions for migrating projects from Fedora Pagure and Package Sources. Participants can take advantage of the learnings on building compatibility bridges, CI/CD workflow modernisation, granular permission models, existing toolchain integration and comprehensive documentation writing, while working on building the Fedora Forge platform.

Resources

• Fedora Moves Towards Forgejo - Fedora Magazine https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-unified-decision/
• Announcing the Soft Launch of Fedora Forge - Fedora Community Blog https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/announcing-the-soft-launch-of-fedora-forge/
• Forging Fedora’s Future with Forgejo - Fedora Community Blog https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/forging-fedoras-future-with-forgejo/
• Git Forge Initiative - Fedora Council - Fedora Wiki https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initiatives/Git_Forge_Initiative_2025
• Dist Git Move - Advanced Reconnaissance Crew - Read The Docs https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dist-git-move/index.html
• Dist Git Comparison - Advanced Reconnaissance Crew - Read The Docs https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dist-git-comparison/index.html

Fedora Mentor Summit: Lunch and Learn Matching

Metadata

• Verdict: Accepted
• Location: Lunch area, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
• Schedule:
  • 14th June 2026, 1245pm-0145pm CEST
  • 15th June 2026, 0100pm-0200pm CEST
  • 16th June 2026, 0100pm-0200pm CEST
• Submitters:
  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Cornelius Emase
  • Jona Azizaj
  • Justin Wheeler
  • Kevin Fenzi
  • Luis Bazan
• Type:
  • Social event
    45 minutes
• Themes:
  • Freedom: The Open Frontier
  • Friends: Our Fedora Story
  • Features: Engineering Fedora's Core
  • First: Blueprint for the Future: Fedora Linux 45 & 46
  • Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora's Future
  • Welcoming New Voices: Pathways for Fedora Contributors
  • Driving Innovation: Fedora and Emerging Technologies
• Complexity:
  • Beginner
    Anyone can follow along without previous context
• Resources:
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/UGZ9KQXDHNX7ZURGENPH3VMZQCMBJ93U
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/YKEZMKUWPAXN8UQYYPQGZALKGEBPGVTW
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/N8FKD9BGNMCJSVEEVCP9EUPFVB3SKFZS

Abstract

Mentorship has always been a big part of what makes Fedora special. After a great response last year, we’re bringing back the Mentor–Mentee Lunch at the Fedora Mentor Summit at Flock 2026, with a small tweak. A casual lunch matching session where everyone can meet face-to-face, share stories, swap ideas, and connect over common goals.

Instructions

• Anyone attending Flock can join.
• Participants are grouped based on topic of interest, no pre-signup required.
• Each day features different topics, so people can explore multiple areas across the event.
• Need a conversation starter? We’ll have a few prompts ready to help break the ice.
• Take a group selfie during lunch and you’ll earn a Fedora Badge as a fun keepsake.

Topics

• Day 1 - Sunday, 14th June 2026
  • Documentation
  • Operations
  • Development
  • Marketing
• Day 2 - Monday, 15th June 2026
  • Packaging
  • Infrastructure
  • Interpersonal Skills
  • Events
• Day 3 - Tuesday, 16th June 2026
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Governance
  • Release Engineering
  • Design

No formal structure - just good food and good conversation with someone else who cares about growing the Fedora community.

Fedora Council Strategic Proposals

Metadata

• Verdict: Accepted
• Location: Plenary hall, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
• Schedule:
  • 15th June 2026, 1100am - 1240pm CEST
• Submitters:
  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Aleksandra Fedorova
  • Aoife Moloney
  • Jef Spaleta
  • Jona Azizaj
  • Justin Wheeler
  • Miro Hroncok
  • Peter Boy
  • Petr Bokoc
• Type:
  • Long presentation
    55 minutes
• Themes:
  • Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora's Future
  • Driving Innovation: Fedora and Emerging Technologies
• Complexity:
  • Intermediate
    Some background knowledge/context is required
• Resource:
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/UTX3M9QDPCM3DCN8ARXXBXPHKT8K97XB

Abstract

The Fedora Council would like to provide an overview of in-progress draft proposals to the community and hold a live community question and answer session to help refine the proposals further before adoption as project policy.

This proposal is an action item from the Fedora Council Strategic Summit to ensure we take advantage of Flock as a key milestone to communicate the status of strategic policy work items that were agreed to as part of the meeting.

Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session - From Conferences To Recognition

Metadata

• Verdict: Accepted
• Location: Plenary hall, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
• Schedule:
  • 16th June 2026, 0245am - 0345pm CEST
• Submitters:
  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Aoife Moloney
  • Emma Kidney
  • Gregory Sutcliffe
  • Joseph Gayoso
  • Justin Wheeler
  • Luis Bazan
  • Mat H
  • Samyak Jain
• Type:
  • Long presentation
    55 minutes
• Themes:
  • Welcoming New Voices: Pathways for Fedora Contributors
• Complexity:
  • Beginner
    Anyone can follow along without previous context
• Resource:
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/JX8ZPEBRMVMZQTV3EDPEHHUH7W7BGYL7

Abstract

From getting resources for swagpacks to laying foundations for conferences, the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session creates an inclusive and structured space for attendees to meet with their representatives, discuss community health, talk engagement strategies, and identify recognition opportunities and evaluate regional growth. This session will briefly cover what the committee has been up to since the last Flock To Fedora conference, before opening up the space for curious questions and open conversations.

While focusing on surfacing challenges and exploring opportunities related to contributor experience, crossteam collaboration, event impacts and outreach effectiveness, participants will be encouraged to share perspectives from their home regions, propose improvements to the committee's processes, and identify concrete next steps that can strengthen the Fedora Project's global community over the next release cycles. Hence, this session intends to take full advantage of both the participants and attendees present at the event.

Fedora Mentor Summit: Contributor Recognition

Metadata

• Verdict: Accepted
• Location: Plenary hall, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
• Schedule:
  • 16th June 2026, 0400pm-0420pm CEST
• Submitters:
  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Cornelius Emase
  • Jona Azizaj
  • Justin Wheeler
• Type:
  • Short presentation
    25 minutes
• Themes:
  • Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora's Future
• Complexity:
  • Beginner
    Anyone can follow along without previous context
• Resources:
  • https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2026/talk/review/JPWK8PH3QKMBWXGQHPXBGKUBXRECR8AP

Abstract

Fedora is built by contributors working across many areas such as development, documentation, design, quality assurance, infrastructure, user support, mentoring, and outreach, many of which happen behind the scenes. The Fedora Contributor Recognition Program was created to recognize and reward outstanding contributions to the Fedora community. In this session, we will explain how the program works, from the open nomination process to the review and selection process carried out by experienced Fedora contributors using criteria such as impact, quality, innovation, and community engagement. We will also share lessons learned from running the program last year. The session will conclude with the announcement of this year’s winners, celebrating their work and highlighting the many ways people contribute to Fedora.

Hello travelers!

Loadouts for Genshin Impact v0.1.17 is OUT NOW with the addition of support for recently released artifacts like Celestial Gift and Disenchantment in Deep Shadow, recently released characters like Nicole, Lohen and Prune and for recently released weapons like Angelos' Heptades and Disaster and Remorse from Genshin Impact Luna VII or v6.6 Phase 2. Take this FREE and OPEN SOURCE application for a spin using the links below to manage the custom equipment of artifacts and weapons for the playable characters.

Resources

• Loadouts for Genshin Impact - GitHub
• Loadouts for Genshin Impact - PyPI
• Loadouts for Genshin Impact v0.1.17
  • Executable for GNU/Linux distributions
  • Executable for Microsoft Windows

Installation

Besides its availability as a repository package on PyPI and as an archived binary on PyInstaller, Loadouts for Genshin Impact is now available as an installable package on Fedora Linux. Travelers using Fedora Linux 42 and above can install the package on their operating system by executing the following command.

$ sudo dnf install gi-loadouts --assumeyes --setopt=install_weak_deps=False

Changelog

• Replace native compilation with integrated building by @gridhead in #544
• Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #545
• Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #547
• Remove unused class variable by @sdglitched in #550
• Fix incorrect type hint for refi_stat by @sdglitched in #551
• Update dependency nuitka to >=2.0.0,<5.0.0 by @renovate[bot] in #552
• Trigger test workflow on pull_request by @sdglitched in #559
• Add the recently added artifact set Celestial Gift to the GI Loadouts roster by @sdglitched in #557
• Add the recently added character Prune to the GI Loadouts roster by @sdglitched in #556
• Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #553
• Introduce the recently added weapon Angelos' Heptades by @gridhead in #560
• Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #563
• Introduce the recently added character Nicole to the roster by @Ank-22 in #565
• Introduce the recently added artifacts Disenchantment in Deep Shadow by @gridhead in #561
• Introduce the recently added character Lohen to the roster by @gridhead in #562
• Introduce the recently added weapon Disaster and Remorse by @Ank-22 in #568
• Update actions/checkout action to v7 by @renovate[bot] in #567
• Stage the release v0.1.17 for Genshin Impact Luna VII (v6.6 Phase 2) by @sdglitched in #574

Artifacts

Two artifacts have debuted in this version release.

Celestial Gift

• Bonus for Two Piece Equipment
  Energy Recharge + 20%.
• Bonus for Four Piece Equipment
  If the equipping character has completed Witch's Homework, after they use an Elemental Skill, they also gain "Light's Guidance" for 20s: All nearby party members gain a 20% Elemental DMG Bonus corresponding to the equipping character's Elemental Type. The equipping character can trigger this effect while off-field. DMG Bonuses provided by Artifact Sets with the same name do not stack.
  When your party has the Hexerei: Secret Rite effect, Light's Guidance is upgraded to "Mortal Hymn": All nearby party members gain a 40% Elemental DMG Bonus corresponding to both the equipping character and the current active party member's Elemental Type instead. If both characters have the same Elemental Type, these bonuses will not stack.

Disenchantment in Deep Shadow

• Bonus for Two Piece Equipment
  ATK +18%.
• Bonus for Four Piece Equipment
  Increases Superconduct Reaction DMG by 80%. When the wielder attacks opponents affected by Superconduct, this attack's CRIT Rate is increased by 16%. An all-new blessing may be obtained as you make your way toward Snezhnaya...

Characters

Three characters have debuted in this version release.

Nicole

Nicole is a catalyst-wielding Pyro character of five-star quality.

Lohen

Lohen is a polearm-wielding Cryo character of five-star quality.

Prune

Prune is a catalyst-wielding Anemo character of five-star quality.

Weapons

Two weapons have debuted in this version release.

Angelos' Heptades

Crown of the Final Scion - Scales on ATK %.

Disaster and Remorse

Dolorous Stroke - Scales on Crit Rate.

Appeal

While allowing you to experiment with various builds and share them for later, Loadouts for Genshin Impact lets you take calculated risks by showing you the potential of your characters with certain artifacts and weapons equipped that you might not even own. Loadouts for Genshin Impact has been and always will be a free and open source software project, and we are committed to delivering a quality experience with every release we make.

Disclaimer

With an extensive suite of over 1580 diverse functionality tests and impeccable 100% source code coverage, we proudly invite auditors and analysts from MiHoYo and other organizations to review our free and open source codebase. This thorough transparency underscores our unwavering commitment to maintaining the fairness and integrity of the game.

The users of this ecosystem application can have complete confidence that their accounts are safe from warnings, suspensions or terminations when using this project. The ecosystem application ensures complete compliance with the terms of services and the regulations regarding third-party software established by MiHoYo for Genshin Impact.

All rights to Genshin Impact assets used in this project are reserved by miHoYo Ltd. and Cognosphere Pte., Ltd. Other properties belong to their respective owners.