Luanti had a stand at FOSDEM for the third year in a row, and it was our best year yet! Held in Brussels, Belgium, FOSDEM is the largest free and open-source conference in the world. FOSDEM is an excellent place to spread the word, bring the community together, and build connections with other FOSS projects.
The stand
Showcase and demos
In previous years, we had a few devices on the stand, each running a specific game. This year, we created a custom main menu that allowed visitors to choose from a selection of games with a single click. This better conveyed the variety available in Luanti and made the interactive demo more enjoyable.
Another change we made was to focus more on the demos. We left the monitor at home and instead brought an extra laptop. The new showcase menu also replaced the showcase flipbook from previous years.
The Linux phone and Steam Deck also returned, making 4 total interactive showcase devices for people to try out.
Flyers, stickers, and postcards
Third time lucky: We finally had enough Luanti stickers at the stand! The Lua stickers and Pride Luanti stickers also proved to be a big hit, as we ended up running out of both. We gave out over 1,500 Luanti stickers, 300 Lua stickers, and 200 Luanti pride stickers.
We did not have access to the original rollup banner, so we took the opportunity to redesign it before printing a new one. We adjusted the flyers to match the new banner design, and tried to capture more information (such as educational resources) to reduce space usage on the table. The design works well, but we will continue to improve our print materials to better represent Luanti as it grows.
We also had post cards to promote the yearly Luanti game jam, of which we gave out almost 100. In the future we would like to include more small print items for community art and designs.
You can find the resources we used on the press page. This includes 5 different translations, as usual.
T-Shirts
We partnered with Teckids e.V to have T-Shirts for sale at the stand.
Teckids is a non-profit community of actively engaged children, youth, and adults. Our goal is fostering comprehensibility of all digital and technical things. Luanti is one central topic our community cares about, and our members strive to be community advocates towards other young people and educators. Among other things, we organize workshops or entire youth camps for FOSS conferences.
Teckids donated half of the profits to Luanti, resulting in 237 € for our non-profit collective. Thank you to Teckids for this and for helping out with the stand!
People we talked to
Once again, education was a large area of interest for our visitors. Lots of people told us that they used Luanti at school or a youth club already. We had many educators and parents asking about how to use Luanti in schools or at home with their kids.
Many former players of Minetest (yes, back when it was a game) recognized the project and were excited about the new possibilites Luanti brings by focusing more on game creation. Some couldn’t even believe it was the same project as before when they saw the new games that are possible.
The hardware demos were also a big hit as usual, with many visitors surprised to see Luanti games running on a Steam Deck and Linux phone. The laptops also showcased the low hardware requirements needed for most Luanti games to run, which many people appreciated.
Junior workshop
On Saturday, Teckids ran a workshop to teach kids how to create Luanti mods. Participants were first introduced to Luanti, and then walked through the basics of creating their first mod, a custom node. The workshop was popular and well-attended, so much that they ran out of chairs! Even so, there were plenty of assistants at the workshop, allowing attendees to receive individual help.
The takeaway message was that software need not be something you just use as-is; it can be something you modify and configure to suit your own needs.
Pizza meetup
FOSDEM serves as a focal point for the Luanti project. After the conference on Saturday night, ten community members went for pizza. This included rubenwardy, Zughy, GreenXenith, luatic, sfan5, y5nw, and ShadowNinja. That’s seven staff members all sitting around one table!
Bringing people together is hugely beneficial for the Luanti project. After the meal, we spent hours discussing how to improve Luanti’s governance and development.
Translation talk
Despite being one of the last talks of the conference, Zughy was able to showcase how his Luanti server has benefited from using Weblate throughout the years. The key takeaways were “don’t reinvent the wheel” (as we did with the .tr extension years ago, to then switch to .po/.pot 🙃), “translators shouldn’t have to deal with git”, “translation means accessibility” and that having a community taking care of translations gives them agency.
You can find the video here.
At the end, one educator was also interested in how translations work in Luanti. They were quite happy to learn that, thanks to Luanti’s modular nature, once that content is translated into e.g. Italian, all the other games and servers that use the same content will automatically benefit from the translation.
Finances
Luanti at FOSDEM 26 cost 1302 € and was funded by our non-profit collective’s supporters and the Italian Linux Society. ILS sponsored the travel and accommodation costs of one staff member.
Our expenses were:
- 614 € for accommodation
- 149 € for travel (for 2)
- 365 € for print materials
- 198 € for flyers and postcards
- 62 € for a roller banner
- 5 € for two donation signs
- 100 € for stand staff t-shirts
- 174 € for the Saturday pizza meetup
This is cheaper than previous years due to a great deal on the hotel, cheaper travel, and not needing to buy stickers this year.
We use Open Collective to ensure that our finances are open and transparent. You can find the raw expense data in the FOSDEM 26 project.
Conclusion
Attending FOSDEM 26 provided a lot of value to the Luanti project. We’d love to attend again next year if they accept our stand.
Thank you to our supporters, the Italian Linux Society, and the community for making FOSDEM 2026 possible.
Cover image by rubenwardy.