I went to my first FOSDEM this year. It was quite an experience with hoards of people and loads of interesting sessions. I was impressed that wifi held up hopefully the videos mean I can catch up on the sessions that filled up.
If you're in Europe and can get to Brussels for the weekend (next year), I really recommend it.
I think it's outgrown the university though. It's practically impossible to get into the developer rooms unless you arrive early and camp there all day.
I agree. It was my first FOSDEM, but I was a little frustrated that I caught maybe 20% of the talks I actually wanted to see. I didn't even get into the PostgreSQL room, despite turning up 15 minutes early for one of the talks.
That said, just complaining about a free conference on Hacker News won't help. I'd like to do my part and help by donating, but only accepting wire transfers is a lot more friction that it should be :(
I thought bradfitz's Camlistore talk was interesting (from the Go devroom), so was the Servo talk (Mozilla), as well as the Mailpile alpha announcement.
There were loads of interesting talks and of course it depends on ones personal preferences. I personally found the following talks very interesting, hinting at the continued commoditization and programmability of the infrastructure:
Currently available, not much, but the interesting stuff is coming up. One of the best talks of FOSDEM was the closing Sunday keynote by phk about the NSA (it's not up yet)
There were several very good talks in the Desktops devroom as well (H1308), none of which are up yet either. That includes Lennart Poettering's talk on kdbus, which is the same one he gave at linux.conf.au (http://lwn.net/Articles/580194/).
If you're in Europe and can get to Brussels for the weekend (next year), I really recommend it.