F44 Council Elections: Interview with Tomáš Hrčka (humaton, jednorozec)

[amoloney (Aoife Moloney)]

Originally published at: F44 Council Elections: Interview with Tomáš Hrčka (humaton, jednorozec) – Fedora Community Blog

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.

Interview with Tomáš Hrčka (humaton, jednorozec)

• FAS ID: humaton, jednorozec
• Matrix Rooms: fedora-forgejo:fedoraproject.org, releng:fedoraproject.org, admin:fedoraproject.org, release-schedule-planner:fedora.im, forgejo-chat:matrix.org

Questions

What kind of experience do you have which might be relevant to the role? E.g Governance, leadership, etc.

In previous years, I was a member of FESCo, where I gained exposure to the governance of the technical side of the Fedora Project.

In my professional life, I currently serve in a leadership role as Product Owner of the Community Linux Engineering team at Red Hat. Our team is responsible for a wide range of areas across the Fedora Project, including Quality Engineering, EPEL, Design, Infrastructure, and Release Engineering.

This gives me a unique perspective that combines community experience, technical understanding, and insight into how Fedora is supported inside Red Hat.

What do you see as potential opportunities and risks for the Fedora Project?

Opportunities

Immutable Desktop
Fedora is well positioned for the shift toward immutable and image-based operating systems. Projects like Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite already provide atomic updates and rollback capabilities while maintaining a strong developer experience.

Cloud-Native and Edge Computing
With Fedora CoreOS and Fedora IoT, Fedora already has strong foundations for container-focused and edge deployments. As these technologies continue to grow, Fedora can remain one of the leading platforms for modern infrastructure.

The Open AI Workstation
Developers increasingly want reliable environments for running local AI workloads and experimenting with open models. Fedora has an opportunity to become the preferred Linux workstation for this use case through strong hardware enablement, modern tooling, and fast adoption of new technologies.

Early Technology Adoption
Fedora has built a reputation for bringing important new technologies to Linux users early, whether that was systemd, Wayland, PipeWire, or Btrfs. That culture of innovation continues to attract developers and contributors who want to help shape the future of Linux.

Risks

Balancing Community and Corporate Influence
Fedora benefits enormously from Red Hat sponsorship, engineering support, and infrastructure. At the same time, maintaining community trust and independence remains critically important. Long-term success depends on keeping a healthy balance between corporate priorities and the Fedora community ethos.

Project Fragmentation
Fedora continues to grow across Spins, Labs, Editions, Atomic variants, and now containers. Growth is healthy, but it also increases the complexity of maintaining consistent quality, direction, and contributor focus across the project.

User Experience vs. FOSS Purity
Fedora’s commitment to free and open-source software is one of its greatest strengths. However, hardware enablement and multimedia support can still be frustrating for many users. Fedora should continue improving the onboarding experience without compromising its principles.

Competition
The Linux ecosystem is moving quickly. Arch Linux attracts many advanced users, Ubuntu remains dominant in commercial environments, and NixOS is gaining momentum among developers interested in reproducible systems and declarative infrastructure. Fedora needs to continue innovating while preserving the strengths that make the project unique.

What brought you to the Fedora Project?

As a user, I was basically forced by my older brother to use Fedora Core 1-3 on our shared family computer.

After a few years of distro hopping, I eventually returned to Fedora because it consistently provided modern software without requiring the amount of maintenance that distributions like Arch Linux demanded at the time.

After years of using Fedora, I wanted to give something back to the community. I started contributing through packaging and co-maintaining several Node.js and Ruby packages.

Later, I had the opportunity to join the Fedora Project professionally as part of the Release Engineering team. Over time, I transitioned into my current role as Product Owner for the team supporting Fedora inside Red Hat.

Today, I have visibility into how work is prioritized across the teams that provide Fedora infrastructure and services, support release engineering and quality processes, and contribute to areas like EPEL, Docs, and Design.

This brings me to the current Council elections. I believe Fedora is at an important crossroads. The project continues to grow, but at the same time, the distribution and contributor experience are becoming increasingly fragmented across Spins, Labs, Atomic variants, containers, and specialized deliverables.

I believe Fedora’s biggest challenge over the next few years will not be innovation. Fedora has always been good at innovation. The real challenge will be maintaining a clear identity, a healthy contributor community, and a coherent user experience while continuing to grow.

[ell1e]

Hi! I hope I’m posting this in the right section and it’s okay if I ask:

But you mention AI in the opportunities section but not the risk section. I wonder, I’m guessing you use AI personally, 1. what do you think it’s benefits are, 2. what do you use it for yourself (did you perhaps use it e.g. to draft your answer? what are your thoughts on the effects of that?), and 3. do you think it’s opportunities really outweigh the risks of what AI use does to community trust?

Regarding the risks and trust, I’m asking since not only does AI hate in the wider population seem to be at an all-time high, it’s also that AI code in particular, which you mention under opportunities, seems to plagiarize constantly and therefore seems to undo attribution of other FOSS projects that were part of the training data. This is seen by many FOSS members as morally damaging and a bad look no matter if legally safe to do or not.

[theprogram (MatH)]

I’m not sure these topics have been set up to be monitored by candidates, so I’ll ping @humaton @jednorozec for you.

[humaton (Tomáš Hrčka)]

@ell1e Thanks for the questions! Yes, I have personally used AI daily for a few years now.

To answer the first question about its benefits: for me personally, it is a rubber duck that talks back. This has been very helpful to me in multiple projects where the codebase evolved over the years and I didn’t get a chance to follow all the developments. Another benefit I see is education. It can be an individually tuned tool that helps people learn and advance at their pace.

Regarding the second question, as a non-native speaker I find AI extremely useful to help convey my ideas in English, and I do use it as a tool to help refine my writing. While writing assistants have been around for much longer than LLMs, the biggest advantage I see in LLMs compared to previous tools is sentiment analysis. Beyond writing, my other main use case is my home-lab. I use it to monitor and maintain some of my small single-purpose tools, and also to find patterns in sensor readings from my homestead.

The last question regarding community trust and attribution is a hard one. Most of the time when I hear about negative reactions to AI, like the concerns you mentioned about plagiarism and uncredited code, it is about big corporations and proprietary foundational models. I see uncredited, regurgitated code as a serious problem. That said, I am not sure if hiding from it is a solution.

This is not the AI I am talking about. I don’t want to see any of the open-source projects I care about become an uncredited pipeline for corporate training datasets. For me, AI is a tool like any other computing technology, and I want to own my tools. So when I say AI, I mean open-weight models running on our infrastructure, working for Fedora contributors. And the possibilitty to easly run those models on Fedora Linux. If we are not the platform of choice, different distributions will be, and we will be losing or not gaining contributors.