This past weekend, I had the chance to attend and speak at UbuCon India 2025, the first-ever UbuCon organised by the Ubuntu India LoCo, hosted at IISc Bengaluru on 15–16 November. As someone who uses Ubuntu every day, works closely with developers and works at Canonical from India, seeing a dedicated Ubuntu community conference happen in India felt both exciting and long overdue.
The setting at Indian Institute of Science’s (IISc) iconic campus gave the event a unique character: world-class research campus outside, highly practical, community-driven conversations inside. UbuCon India was positioned as a gathering point for developers, contributors, users, and FOSS enthusiasts, with tracks ranging from desktop and developer experience to cloud, Kubernetes, IoT, AI/ML, documentation, and community building. That breadth meant every attendee could build their own path through the program and still stay firmly within the Ubuntu ecosystem.
I delivered a talk on “Ubuntu for Developers,” where I touched on why Ubuntu is an increasingly strong choice as a primary developer desktop, how it simplifies setting up toolchains for languages like Java, .NET, Python, Go, and Rust, and how aligning desktop and cloud environments reduces friction in modern workflows. What made the session special for me was the audience: engaged, curious, and not shy about asking detailed questions about real-world setups.
As everyone who has attended such community conferences knows, the hallway discussions were where a lot of the magic happened—meeting Ubuntu India Circle members, students exploring their first contributions, and engineers running Ubuntu in production at scale. Walking out of IISc at the end of the second day, it was clear that UbuCon India 2025 wasn’t just a successful event; it was the start of a new chapter for the Ubuntu community in India.