Hello World, this is Nikhil.

A sizeable subset of ATLAS recently attended IndiaFOSS 2026. This is a collection of post-event thoughts, from my perspective and ATLAS.

ATLAS was first started as a way to collect interesting and motivated students within Amrita. Over time, it has turned into a vibrant community full of knowledgeable and capable engineers from everywhere ATLAS has gone, who have opened our eyes to so much. IndiaFOSS 2025 was a turning point for this - we made new friends at the incredible COSH NITK team, amFOSS from Amrita Amritapuri, HSP formerly from PES EC, and more.

In fact, a couple of our GC members, who aren’t Amrita Bengaluru students, gave talks this year:

• Seqout: search engine for the world’s genomic data by Mukesh
• Making Desktops Expressive: Introducing Bézier Curves to GTK by Aman from amFOSS

A few of us have been attending for a few years (personally, this is my third time). Last year, we had a single digit number of attendees from Amrita. This year, we had over 30, in no small part due to ATLAS’ influence.

For returning attendees, the conference itself is largely the same from one year to the next. However, it is the highlight of the year that the entire Indian tech community (the good part of it, anyways) rallies around - a Schelling point (i found about this recently and wanted to use the word) for old or internet-only friends to finally engage in person. I am grateful to have finally met people I had only known of online, from the IITM BS program, amrita.town, and beyond.

For posterity, we decided to collect our members’ experiences, many of whom came for the first time this year. This has both Amrita students and outside members.

Adithya

Written on his website - https://adithyanair.com/blog/indiafoss-2026

Nithilan

Written on his website - https://nithitsuki.com/posts/indiafoss2026-up-the-fomo/

Visruth

Written on his website - https://www.beppvis.works/blogs/coming-to-IndiaFOSS

Saket

I unfortunately couldn’t make it to Day 2, but I saw a lot of cool things on Day 1. Since many people have already mentioned the bigger highlights, I’ll share a few things that stood out to me specifically.

The session Build your own open source keyboard with ZMK/QMK was one of them. I’d done some similar work with keypads in a college IoT lab, and it was interesting to see how the same ideas apply to real keyboards, with a few more factors to consider. Advait Dhamorikar of Mecha Systems delivered the session really well. When I later looked up Mecha Systems’ work, I was fascinated—it was the kind of stuff I’ve always wanted to do. Seeing the PLING! split keyboard and other custom keyboards at the Hardware Showcase made me even more interested.

Abhas Abhinav’s session, “Tracking-free and hackable network cameras — powered by libre software” also stood out. I didn’t understand all the specifics, but it gave me a glimpse into his way of thinking. I later looked through his sites and found his work really interesting. I’d like to learn more about it.

I loved hearing that Xeneva got the rights to distribute and sell Flipper Zero in India. I’d been intrigued by it from YouTube, and even though I still don’t understand all its uses, it was clear that it’s an effective tool. Seeing it become available in India brought me a lot of joy. XenevaOS was really cool too!

And F-Droid! I love F-Droid, so I was pleasantly surprised to see its booth.

Amogh R

• Talking to so many enthusiastic people, including people I’d met at previous meetups.
• The talks on compilers and security. I attended a few AOSP talks too, but most clashed with sessions in Hall 3, and I was tired of running up and down every ten minutes.
• Insanely cool hardware showcases! I tried a split keyboard for the first time. Thanks, Balu!
• All the booths, especially the fractals and 3D-printing booth, and ente. I loved their designs and stickers.

Souhrud Reddy

See also: Mastodon thread

Do the cool things we did count?

I got “kidnapped” (joke! I volunteered for fun) into watching the openSUSE booth for about three minutes.

I took a bunch of F-Droid flyers and spread the gospel.

I failed horribly, alongside Nithilan and Akhileshwar, at a wholesome OpenStreetMap quiz that included high-school-level geography.

I got a one-on-one explanation of recursion through the Hilbert curve from the folks at PaperCraneLabs. Seriously, check them out!

I got some merch from SillyCuts.

I hijacked a recently vacated booth in the open-hardware section. It turned out to be my booth, which I’d donated to the common absurd pool. Mostly, I hung out and talked about mainline Linux there.

Things I saw:

• The Kannada font project—and a real digitization tool in action at the same booth.
• The CNC4Everyone talk.
• Ali’s audio hardware talk, “Building Open Source Music Hardware in India — Tarab Instruments”.
• A real alternative to Luma and Shopify from BWH. Please invest time and social-network effect share into this. Do your part!
• A pure Python implementation of transitions as movements of Bézier curves. :)

Chirayu

Honestly, I didn’t expect to see such a big open-source community thriving and growing. It was cool to see how many people are interested in homelabbing, and how many are on the security side of things.

A really cool community overall. Big thanks to ATLAS for sharing the event! I’ll be going again for sure next year.

Chaturya

Met dozens of people who vibed with my niche for the first time all in the same place.

Karthik (@axiss)

• Diagram Chasing, so much RK Laxman energy.
• openSUSE.
• The hardware-hacking talk, “Keeping an Eye on your Eye: Disassembling and Reassembling Smart Camera Hardware to breach YOUR Security”.

Akhileshwar

I’m definitely looking forward to more IndiaFOSS events.

• All the talks were really good, but “Shaili Sanchaya: Reviving Indic Typography from Archival Metadata” especially connected with me.
• Diagram Chasing and Bengawalk I love their work. I suggest everyone check them out.
• Met many cool people.
• And, of course, stickers.

Priyanshu (@aspizu)

Cool thing I saw: the coolest ente engineer ever. @aspizu

BN Nagaraajan

AOSP and “Zero Trust, Zero TEE: Porting Android 16 to a Device Whose Security Stack Doesn’t Exist Yet”.

Low-key, “Making Desktops Expressive: Introducing Bézier Curves to GTK” really got me.

Manasvini

Two booths I really liked:

1. Xeneva - for its creative products. They were also talking about latency below 10 ms. It’s wild to think all this started as a hobby.
2. PaperCraneLabs - I talked with them about art drawn by equations, including the Iranian artist they mentioned. It was lovely to see someone turning math into art with hardware, not just simulations.

Rajveer

IndiaFOSS was honestly great. I got to see how to use nodes in Blander to make trees, terrain etc, which was pretty cool.

The booths were great too, especially FreeBSD and Debian I found one booth from my own hometown. of course I collected all the stickers I could. The openSUSE gekko anime character picture was also pretty unexpected and cool.

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For next year, I hope ATLAS has a more public presence. Booths? Talks from more of our members (especially from Amrita Bengaluru)? I’m excited for what the future holds.