DebConf25 closes in Brest and DebConf26 announced
August 3rd, 2025
On Saturday 19 July 2025, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.
Over 443 attendees representing 50 countries from around the world came together for a combined 169 events (including some which took place during the DebCamp) including more than 50 Talks, 39 Short Talks, 5 Discussions, 59 Birds of a Feather sessions ("BoF" – informal meeting between developers and users), 10 workshops, and activities in support of furthering our distribution and free software, learning from our mentors and peers, building our community, and having a bit of fun.
The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp hacking session held 7 through 13 July where Debian Developers and Contributors convened to focus on their individual Debian-related projects or work in team sprints geared toward in-person collaboration in developing Debian. This year, a session was dedicated to prepare the BoF "Dealing with Dormant Packages: Ensuring Debian's High Standards"; another, at the initiative of our DPL, to prepare suggestions for the BoF “Package Acceptance in Debian: Challenges and Opportunities"; and an afternoon around Salsa-CI. As has been the case for several years, a special effort has been made to welcome newcomers and help them become familiar with Debian and DebConf by organizing a sprint "New Contributors Onboarding" every day of Debcamp, followed more informally by mentorship during DebConf.
The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Monday 14 July 2025. In addition to the traditional "Bits from the DPL" talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks, and the announcement of next year's DebConf26, there were several update sessions shared by internal projects and teams. Many of the hosted discussion sessions were presented by our technical core teams with the usual and useful "Meet the Technical Committee", the "What's New in the Linux Kernel" session, and a set of BoFs about Debian packaging policy and Debian infrastructure. Thus, more than a quarter of the discussions dealt with this theme, including talks about our tools and Debian's archive processes. Internationalization and Localization have been the subject of several talks. The Python, Perl, Ruby, Go, and Rust programming language teams also shared updates on their work and efforts. Several talks have covered Debian Blends and Debian-derived distributions and other talks addressed the issue of Debian and AI. More than 17 BoFs and talks about community, diversity, and local outreach highlighted the work of various teams involved in not just the technical but also the social aspect of our community; four women who have made contributions to Debian through their artwork in recent years presented their work. The one-day session "DebConf 2025 Academic Track!", organized in collaboration with the IRISA laboratory was the first session welcoming fellow academics at DebConf, bringing together around ten presentations.
The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the conference. Several traditional activities took place: a job fair, a poetry performance, the traditionalCheese and Wine party (this year with cider as well), the Group Photos, and the Day Trips.
For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were broadcasted live and recorded; currently the videos are made available through this link. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC and Matrix messaging apps or online collaborative text documents which allowed remote attendees to "be in the room" to ask questions or share comments with the speaker or assembled audience.
DebConf25 saw over 441 T-shirts, 3 day trips, and up to 315 meals planned per day. All of these events, activities, conversations, and streams coupled with our love, interest, and participation in Debian and F/OSS certainly made this conference an overall success both here in Brest, France and online around the world.
The DebConf25 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.
Next year, Debconf26 will be held in Santa Fe, Argentina, likely in July. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in Argentina will start the conference activities with DebCamp with a particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf25 website for more details on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf25, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: AMD EDF Infomaniak, Proxmox, and Viridien.
We also wish to thank our Video and Infrastructure teams, the DebConf25 and DebConf committees, our host nation of France, and each and every person who helped contribute to this event and to Debian overall. Thank you all for your work in helping Debian continue to be "The Universal Operating System". See you next year!
About Debian
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and
supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the
universal operating system
.
About DebConf
DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, and Korea. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org.
About AMD
The AMD ROCm platform includes programming models, tools, compilers, libraries, and runtimes for AI and HPC solution development on AMD GPUs. Debian is an officially supported platform for AMD ROCm and a growing number of components are now included directly in the Debian distribution. For more than 55 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies. AMD is deeply committed to supporting and contributing to open-source projects, foundations, and open-standards organizations, taking pride in fostering innovation and collaboration within the open-source community.
About EDF
EDF is a leading global utility company focused on low-carbon power generation. The group uses advanced engineering and scientific computing tools to drive innovation and efficiency in its operations, especially in nuclear power plant design and safety assessment. Since 2003, the EDF Group has been using Debian as its main scientific computing environment. Debian's focus on stability and reproducibility ensures that EDF's calculations and simulations produce consistent and accurate results.
About Infomaniak
Infomaniak is Switzerland's leading developer of Web technologies. With operations all over Europe and based exclusively in Switzerland, the company designs and manages its own data centers powered by 100% renewable energy, and develops all its solutions locally, without outsourcing. With millions of users and the trust of public and private organizations across Europe - such as RTBF, the United Nations, central banks, over 3,000 radio and TV stations, as well as numerous cities and security bodies - Infomaniak stands for sovereign, sustainable and independent digital technology. The company offers a complete suite of collaborative tools, cloud hosting, streaming, marketing and events solutions, while being owned by its employees and self-financed exclusively by its customers.
About Proxmox
Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use Open Source server software. The product portfolio from Proxmox, including server virtualization, backup, and email security, helps companies of any size, sector, or industry to simplify their IT infrastructures. The Proxmox solutions are built on Debian, we are happy that they give back to the community by sponsoring DebConf25.
About Viridien
Viridien is an advanced technology, digital and Earth data company that pushes the boundaries of science for a more prosperous and sustainable future. Viridien has been using Debian-based systems to power most of its HPC infrastructure and its cloud platform since 2009 and currently employs two active Debian Project Members.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the DebConf25 web page at https://debconf25.debconf.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.