These seats are waiting for you

Before the lights go up at SIGGRAPH, join the AlmaLinux OS Foundation for a day dedicated to the OS that powers the world's most demanding visual effects, rendering, and simulation pipelines.

Los Angeles is the natural home for this conversation. The films, the shows, the games, and the immersive experiences shaping global culture this year are being rendered, simulated, and finished on Linux — and increasingly on AlmaLinux. On July 18, the people behind that work are getting in the same room.

Expect a full day of technical deep-dives, candid conversations with the engineers building AlmaLinux, and a first look at something we have been quietly preparing specifically for the Media & Entertainment industry. Expect to leave with sharper answers, new collaborators, and a clearer view of where enterprise Linux is headed for the creative pipeline.

Why Saturday? Beat the Sunday BoF rush and get your technical deep-dives in before the 10,000+ attendee crowd arrives. Smaller room, bigger signal, no compromises.

Call for Speakers

Our call for speakers is open. If you are a VFX or pipeline engineer, a Linux professional, a cloud or DevOps engineer, an open-source contributor, or anyone with a story the room would learn from, we want to hear from you.

The Vancouver lineup last year set the bar. “AlmaLinux for Always-On VFX Pipelines”, “Linux in VFX: A Panel on Pain, Power, and Progress”, “A Strategic Playbook for Large-Scale Linux Migrations”, and the “KDE, NVIDIA, and AlmaLinux OS 10.1” workshop sat alongside hard-won practical talks on container monitoring and workstation security — the unglamorous, load-bearing work that quietly keeps studios shipping. (Watch the full Vancouver playlist on YouTube.)

We’d love to see more of that this year. Some areas we are particularly hungry for:

• Render farms and pipelines at scale — always-on architectures, queueing and scheduling, hybrid on-prem/cloud, the TCO math you actually use to make the case to finance.
• Migration stories from the trenches — CentOS, RHEL, or anything else → AlmaLinux. What broke, what didn’t, what you’d do differently if you had to do it again.
• Security and CVE response — workstation hardening, vulnerability response in production, kernel patching strategies, what your incident timeline really looks like.
• Containers and orchestration for studios — monitoring, observability, image management, the operational pieces that don’t get pitched at the bigger conferences.

Submissions close June 5, 2026. Submit your proposal at sessionize.com/almalinux-day-los-angeles.

The Pillars of the Day

For years, the VFX and Media industries have sought a bedrock — a stable ground where the most demanding renders and the most complex simulations could live without fear of shifting underfoot. In 2026, that ground becomes solid.

AlmaLinux Day: LA is not just a conference; it is a convergence. As the industry moves toward universal open standards, we invite the architects of digital worlds — the studios, the researchers, and the innovators — to see what happens when enterprise stability meets creative raw power.

The AlmaLinux Creative Installer, Up Close

For the first time at an AlmaLinux Day, we're shining a light on the AlmaLinux Creative Installer — a community-built, one-click tool that drops 30+ professional creative apps onto AlmaLinux without a single terminal command.

GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Blender, FreeCAD, DaVinci Resolve, Kdenlive, OBS, Ardour, Audacity — the full bench. Built by KernelChief and supported by the AlmaLinux Media & Entertainment SIG, aimed at the freelancers, indie studios, and students who need their pipeline working today, not next quarter. No IT team required.

See it live in Los Angeles.

The “Pre-SIGGRAPH” Advantage

We know Sunday is all about those official “Birds of a Feather” sessions. By joining us on Saturday, you get:

• Uninterrupted Networking: High-signal conversations before the 10,000+ attendee crowd arrives.
• Technical Access: Direct 1-on-1 time with the AlmaLinux Engineering, Marketing, and Media & Entertainment SIGs.
• The “Satur-Day” Mixer: An exclusive evening social to kick off your week in LA.

Where to Stay

AlmaLinux Day: LA is hosted at the E-Central Downtown Los Angeles Hotel, 1020 S Figueroa St — and we recommend you stay right where the event is. E-Central is steps from the LA Convention Center (no shuttles needed), and within walking distance of Crypto.com Arena, LA Live, the Grammy Museum, and the Peacock Theater. The rooms are contemporary, the wellness center is newly renovated, and the location lets you roll out of your room and straight into the conference all week long.

Whether you’re coming for just AlmaLinux Day or staying through SIGGRAPH, booking here means one hotel, no commute, and the easiest possible logistics for your week in LA.

Important Dates

These two dates anchor the rest of your week. AlmaLinux Day: LA opens the conversation on Saturday before the SIGGRAPH crowd arrives, and SIGGRAPH 2026 picks it up Sunday and runs through Thursday. If you are planning travel, the easy move is a single trip that covers both — fly in Friday or Saturday morning, walk to AlmaLinux Day, and you’re already where you need to be for the rest of the week.

A few related dates worth pinning to your calendar: the Call for Speakers closes June 5, the schedule is announced June 15, and SIGGRAPH’s own registration and housing deadlines start arriving shortly after — check s2026.siggraph.org for those.

Register early — space in our LA venue is limited. Sign up for updates and be the first to grab a seat at events.almalinux.org.