Meeting Summary 6/20/2026
We had a great first meeting. Thanks to Hugh, Harry, Vivian, Damian, and Nat for coming! Everyone had substantial Linux experience, and it was fun to hear about some of the things people are working on, especially mesh networking.
In addition to being a generally welcome space for people interested in Linux to gather, including people who are completely new to Linux or Free Software, folks were also interested in discussing and helping each other with personal projects, as well as demonstrations of tools or technologies.
For meeting times and locations, it sounds like monthly on a Saturday works best for everyone, somewhere readily accessible by public transportation (sorry to anyone further up-county!). That will limit things somewhat, since Saturdays tend to be more popular with groups trying to book library meeting rooms. I’ll take a look at our options, and see what’s available.
We spent a fair amount of time discussing the best way to communicate. Discord seems to be the most popular option, though there are other options available, such as a mailing list or [matrix]. We can even combine these, say by bridging Discord and [matrix]. Vivian has some experience with this, as well as self-hosting a server.
We also talked about mobile phones and various options. Vivian is running Graphene with success, though she has a fallback iPhone to chat with her family, who are sadly captured by the Apple ecosystem. I (Mike) mentioned being interested in using a flip-phone as a hotspot for a smartphone acting as a mini tablet (that is, without call and text capabilities), though I was concerned about losing access to Signal with that. It sound like that shouldn’t be an issue, though, since Signal only requires a phone number capable of receiving SMS when authorizing a new device. Moxie is a third-party client for Signal which should work on smartphones and tablets, since Signal doesn’t support non-phone Android or iOS devices.
For our next meeting (time and place TBD), it would be great to go over our server options in more detail. Do we want to have a pure-[matrix] community, bridge [matrix] and Discord, or something different? For a service like [matrix], do we want to use an existing server (like matrix.org) or host our own? This promises to be an interesting technical discussion, so I hope we have a good crop of people join us! As always, we’re also open to newbies who want to learn more about Linux. I also have some USB thumb drives and installer images for those who are interested in getting started with Linux.
