Was my first FOSDEM too and I'm definetly planning to attend next year as well!
One thing I didn't like was how crowded some of the rooms were. I wanted to watch some talks in the rust devroom but it was so crowded I pretty much gave up watching the talks live and spent my time behind the codeberg stand.
Luckily theres recordings of the talks online ^^
If you're room hopping you're essentially going to have to give up on entering some rooms at all. Some people have the strategy of sitting in a less crowded room and then switching to a stream from a crowded room whenever they feel like, but the success of that kind of depends on the infrastructure.
It needs a new venue. My first FOSDEM was immediately before COIVD-19 broke out and it was the last time I travelled for 2 years straight. If someone would have had COVID at that conference probably lots of OSS devs would have died.
FOSDEM doesn't fit in its venue anymore, which is great in a way. It's been incredibly successful, but now it's time to find a bigger venue.
Perhaps. But then again, its reason for success and its charm comes from being given access to the University for free because it's being run by a university-associated team. Messing with that would almost certainly destroy the character of the conference.
Yeah, it sort of is what it is both in terms of venue size and time of year. At the end of the day you find an attendance strategy that works best for you and work around the worst of the crowding. (Or just watch some videos.)
Personally, it's quite a bit less tempting to attend than it was when there were a number of more-or-less time adjacent European events I had some interest in.
I got FOSDEM flu from FOSDEM 2020 and sometimes wondered if it was COVID-19. Absolutely horrendous flu, and a few of my friends also got it. This was obviously pre all the testing that would become commonplace in the coming months. Who knows.
