I went to FOSSASIA Summit 2026 in Bangkok, and I took the time to write this report because of how much things happened in three days, also because I am not much of a blogger.

FOSSASIA is Asia's big open source event and this year it took place at True Digital Park West - a rather exageratted shopping mall and convention center, which was great because whenever I was hungry I could just quickly go eat some lovely thai dishes, and back.

KDE had a community booth, and I spent a fair amount of time there alongside Pongsakorn, who held things down while I was off getting pulled into hallway conversations. We had a few devices on display running Plasma and I got to show off some recent Konsole work to anyone who wandered over.

Some people requested me to show what mattered more to me in KDE, why I was a KDE developer, or why don't I use $software from a different provider. I explained that KDE is not just about the software, but about the community and the people who contribute to it, but also about the software. There is no other terminal that can do what konsole does (well, now it's my second favorite terminal, my favorite one is https://ratty-term.org/).

The hallway track was, as usual, where a lot of the real conversations happened. One of the more interesting ones was with some developers from OpenKylin. They're building a Linux distribution and they are using KDE Technology behind it. During our conversation we talked about how to better integrate the OpenKylin distribution with KDE Technology, and I ended up with an invitation to their HQ in shanghai - there will be another blogpost about this.

Bangkok itself was great, but also strangely familiar - all the streets, buildings, and the way people behave fit exactly in the city that I grew up in, Salvador, in Brazil. It was strange to see a country in asia to be so similar to my hometown. Coming back from a conference like this always leaves me with a mixed feeling: energized by all the conversations and connections, and slightly overwhelmed by the list of things I now want to go and implement or investigate. The OpenKylin conversation got me thinking more about how distributions handle the upstream relationship. And seeing what different communities are building with AI at the OS level was genuinely interesting, even if I'm skeptical of some of the grander claims in the space.

FOSSASIA remains one of the better events to go to if you want a view of what open source looks like outside the European and North American bubble, and we need to connect with other communities to learn from and collaborate with.