The Winston-Salem Linux Users Group is a community of Linux, Unix, BSD, and open-source users in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina. If you run Linux on a laptop, manage fleets of servers, contribute to open-source projects, or are just curious about what all of this is — you are welcome here.
We are intentionally broad. The name says Linux because that is how people search for us and how people recognize the kind of group we are. In practice, meetings cover Linux kernel internals, Unix tradition, BSD, open-source tooling, system administration, security, and whatever members happen to want to talk about.
There is no membership fee, no application, no formal roster. Show up to a meeting, subscribe to the mailing list, or just read the site. That is membership.
Meetings
WSLUG meets quarterly, in person, at Sparq, the coworking space at the Innovation Quarter in downtown Winston-Salem. A typical meeting runs about two hours:
- A 45–60 minute presentation on a Linux, Unix, or open-source topic
- Questions and answers
- Informal time to talk with other attendees
- Pizza and drinks
Topics are suggested and presented by members. Past and planned subjects include kernel internals, self-hosting, shell craft, filesystem design, open-source licensing, Unix history, systemd (and its critics), BSD, and security tooling. If you have something you want to talk about, you can present it — no credentials required.
- Next meeting
- TBD — join the mailing list for the announcement
- Venue
- Sparq — 486 N Patterson Ave, 2nd Floor, Winston-Salem, NC 27101
- Cadence
- Quarterly
- Cost
- Free
- Format
- Talk · Q&A · informal networking
History
WSLUG continues the tradition of the Piedmont Linux Users Group (PLUG), which met at Wake Forest University's Olin Physical Laboratory from the mid-1990s onward. The first PLUG meetings gathered around Pentium 586 machines running early Linux distributions — Slackware, early Red Hat, the occasional experimental build straight off a kernel patch — in an era when installing Linux was a weekend-long exercise involving a stack of floppy disks, a paper copy of the kernel documentation, and no small amount of faith.
For many years, PLUG's mailing list was hosted at Wake Forest at lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/plug, and the group operated as a loose, open community of students, faculty, and area enthusiasts. Meetings were announced on the list. Install-fests happened in the lab. Questions were answered in person and in plain text.
As the years passed, core members graduated and moved on, campus infrastructure evolved, and the mailing list was eventually retired. The hostname no longer resolves; the old list is gone. But the community it served — the Linux and Unix users of the Piedmont Triad — is still here.
WSLUG is the successor: new infrastructure, new meeting location, same mission. If you attended PLUG at Wake Forest in its earlier eras, you are especially welcome. Bring your stories.
Membership
Membership is open and free. There is nothing to sign, no dues, no paperwork. There are three ways to be a member, any one of which is enough:
Subscribe to the mailing list
The list is where meetings are announced, questions are asked, and help is offered. Low traffic, useful signal, no spam. Hosted at Groups.io.
The WSLUG list is a two-way discussion list, not a newsletter. When a member posts a question, every subscriber gets it in their inbox. Your reply goes back to the whole list. Everything is archived and searchable at groups.io. It is how LUGs have communicated since the 1990s and still the best way to get help from people who know things you do not.
Show up to a meeting
See Meetings. Meetings are open to anyone; no RSVP required, though a headcount for pizza is appreciated.
Get in touch
Questions, suggestions, a topic you want to present, a venue you want to offer, an old PLUG story: info@wslug.org.
News
Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.0 on April 12, rolling over the major version from 6.19. True to form, Torvalds notes that the version bump is a numbering convention rather than a signal of any dramatic architectural change — the kernel continues to promise stable interfaces and behavior across major versions.
That said, 7.0 includes a few genuinely notable changes. Rust support has been promoted from experimental to stable, concluding the "Rust experiment" that was officially wrapped at the 2025 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit. Kernel module authentication gains ML-DSA post-quantum signatures, and support for SHA-1-based module signing has been removed. Filesystem improvements include enhancements to XFS self-healing; memory management gets another round of swap subsystem tuning.
Linux 7.0 will ship as the default kernel in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44, both due in late April. Rolling-release distributions have it already. The first release candidate of Linux 7.1 is expected around April 26.
Torvalds also noted an interesting trend in his release announcement: AI-assisted tooling continues to surface previously unnoticed corner cases in kernel code. "This may be the new normal," he wrote. "Only time will tell."