In 2026, over 2,000 visitors once again made their way to Styria. In the beautiful city of Graz, attendees gathered for 30 talks, 9 workshops, 23 information booths, and a coding challenge hosted by the main sponsor, grommunio.
Even though the results of this popular programming competition are still being tallied (a follow-up blog post is coming soon), one thing is already certain: The Graz Linux Days are always worth the trip.
Two talks and a long workshop
All presentations, including two by grommunio staff members, are already available online as videos on the Chaos Computer Club’s website, as well as on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/grazerlinuxtage/videos or in the Fediverse on Peertube.
The presentations covered topics such as tracking traffic lights, cars, and trams; “CSI: IT”; 30 years of KDE — to be celebrated in September, also in Graz!; Android without surveillance; gaming with Linux; and what’s going wrong or not working at all in the Austrian Fediverse (and why).
grommunio: Open Source Reality
In his presentation titled “grommunio – Bridging Reality: Open Source, Digital Sovereignty. Open Source, Not Open-Washed,” grommunio CTO Michael Kromer demonstrates how digital sovereignty actually works in practice—using grommunio as a concrete example, of course.
“grommunio is real open source, not just aside of it!”
“While others are building yet another closed ecosystem—even if it’s ‘open source’ on paper—grommunio focuses on making open source usable in real-world environments, not just next to it,” said Kromer.
On the Saturday of the event, grommunio’s CTO also gave a record-breaking 4-hour workshop in which he installed and configured “grommunio from scratch” and answered numerous questions. Unfortunately, the workshops in Graz were not recorded, likely due to their length. During the workshop, Kromer showed the interested audience how he sets up a new grommunio system, the way he sees it and with all the best practices of how it is intended.
A potential record-breaker: a four-hour workshop
During the workshop, he walked through the system’s architecture and services, configured users, domains, and groupware features, and took a look at existing clients and how they interact with Grommunio—primarily Outlook, but also mobile devices, the web, and Thunderbird. Thanks to protocols and interfaces such as Exchange Web Services (EWS), a lot has changed in the past year.
„Hacking with Open Source Letters“
Another packed talk was given by Markus Feilner, evangelist and open source ambassador at grommunio, who described how one can achieve political success by writing an open letter in support of open source—provided one has “more luck than sense” and global politics plays along. “How We Hacked the Bavarian State with an Open Source Open Letter” is the title; the video is also available on the CCC website.
The Graz Linux Days are now wrapping up for another year; anyone who’d like to can submit their feedback here and, as always, comment on individual talks here.
The GLT are organized every year by volunteers and supported by sponsors such as grommunio and its partner CANCOM. But: “The Graz Linux Days are about more than just Linux. We now deal with everything related to the use of free software, and much more.” We look forward to next year in Graz!
See for yourself what grommunio has to offer and try out a demo.