The Desktop Summit is almost over. I spent the core days there, mostly just meeting old friends and listening to parts of some talks. The whole event felt very smooth, in an excellent venue. There was just enough partying, though I always sneak away early to get some rest.
As Openismus has a large Berlin office, several employees volunteered to help with the organization. I hear they did a great job. Thanks to Chris, David, Jon, Kat, and Patricia. Only a little of their time was provided by Openismus, because I didn’t want the responsibility, so I can’t take the credit either – it’s all theirs.
Openismus also provided some space for the GObect+Introspection hackfest over the last 3 days.
I’m not a fan of KDE and GNOME combining their conferences. I think GUADEC (and Akademy) should inspire developers, herding them in a common direction, but it’s tediously hard to focus on our core values while surrounded by others who simply don’t agree. But I’m not particularly relevant to GNOME these days so my opinion shouldn’t count for much, and people seemed to like it last time.
I do love Berlin and it’s great to see others discover it too.
“I think GUADEC (and Akademy) should inspire developers, herding them in a common direction, but it’s tediously hard to focus on our core values while surrounded by others who simply don’t agree.”
the assumptions in the above statement are very interesting, namely: we can’t be inspired together (or at least: we can only achieve a weak version of that), we have no commonality in directions (nor should?), we share no core values and that its only when GNOME and KDE contributors are combined that there are disagreements.
well, i do think we can be inspired together, there are many commonalities starting with a commitment to Free software to shared infrastructure to a large shared user base and as for disagreements .. well .. i saw a lot of agreement between people who participate in the two communities. i also walked in on at least one screaming match (literally) between three GNOME contributors about a topic which went on for quite a while.
i do agree that there remains value in having Akademy and GUADEC as separate events at least every other year, though not particularly because a combined event does not bring usuful things or is unable to build common ground which we can all stand on together. to me the value in a separate event is that it allows us to focus on a smaller part of the larger scope of the landscape with more attention. this can allow faster and more focussed progress on specific topics. simply a matter of scale. the combined events help ballance this out and avoid myopia, though even at the combined events there is a lot of very excellent work that is focused on specific issues, software and solutions, as this year’s Berlin conference demonstrated quite clearly through the rooms and events dedicated to things like GStreamer, systemd and Plasma Active.
personally i see a continued need for both …
It’s really time to get over this “them” and “us”. It’s childish. Both KDE and GNOME guys want to build free desktops. There are different opinions what makes a good desktop, but there also is lots of common ground. Lots of infrastructure is shared: Linux, X.org, DBus, GStreamer, Pulseaudio, Telepathy, WebKit, … So let’s focus on that, and let’s use shared events to inspire each other. For instance I wonder right now how similar Plasma activities and Jakub’s idea behind GNOME3’s right now quite useless dynamic, automatic workspaces are. Maybe those dynamic workspaces become more useful if there’s a way to restore certain workspace configurations… “activities” in KDE slang. You don’t get such ideas if you avoid meeting each other.
So maybe we can just grow up and finally build convincing Linux desktops. Our market share is embarrassing small considering how long that Linux thing is around now. So far we quite failed. Are we really such loosers?