GUADEC

GUADEC itself was great, nice people, awesome location and fantastic weather. Thanks to everyone making this possible. I have a little thing to critisise though: IMHO the schedule had some issues! Some really interesting talks were scheduled in the Opening Hours or in the After Hours which not really many people attended. On the core days, some important talks happened at the same time and I don’t think it’s a good idea to schedule anything against the Lightning talks. Some other people I talked to had a similiar opinion but that may of course still just be a small group. Anyway, I would love if some experienced GNOME people could check the schedule for such conflicts next year.

Party

• Opening Cocktails: missed due to great view from appartment…
• Boat Party: Maybe the best GNOME party ever, I doubt that everybody can remember the whole evening. Talked to lots of people though sometimes conversation was rather off-topic. Thanks to the people at Collabora for organizing the event!
• Closing Party: Well, either I was to tired from the day before or it simply wasn’t that good.

GNOME 3.0 (aka 2.30)

The last days I thought a lot about what our goal for 3.0 should be and how we could probably achieve them. First, I think the decision to break API/ABI is good in general as it will remove maintaining tasks for old and deprecated modules from some very important people.  Doing this together with Gtk+ 3.0 also sound very reasonable.

Schedule: To achieve more than just the usual small steps between our releases and instead have the time for some bigger things I would propose to leave out GNOME 2.28. That does not mean there will be no GNOME 2.28 release but that there will be no new features but of course string additions, documentation additions and bug-fixes. That would leave developers a reasonable timeframe to get some bigger changes in and port everything to 3.0 in time.

Gtk+ 3.0: Most of the things that Imendio proposes sound reasonable but we should really try to get CSS-like theming because it will attract much more designers to create themes.

Goals: Define clearly now what our goals for GNOME 3.0 are and how we want to achieve them. Maybe the best thing is to have a brainstorm place (on the wiki) and somebody who organizes those ideas in a way that the community/release team can make decisions based on clear concepts. Some of the things that are important to me:

• Better file handling: Frederico had some very nice ideas on that and I think he is right with most of the things he proposed. Of course it would be cool to have a versioned file-system but we haven’t yet and of course some UI ideas might not be perfect. Who cares? Let’s implement what we can do now immediately and enhance it when we have more technologies available. This is something that does not really have to wait for 3.0
• Rethink the panel: Our current panel is not really a modern user interface and as Frederico also said, you have to click too often. And it wastes too much screen-space. I don’t have the perfect solution yet but having those fading sidetabs might be an idea but I am sure there are some other interesting things to think about. I would really encourage people to create mock-ups for a future desktop design.
• More power to the WindowManager: I don’t really like the idea of having an entry in the titlebar but it’s really time to use the available space for something more useful than the window title. Another thing I would love to have is a “Minimize to Icon” button.
• Better default theme: Clearlooks is nice but if you compare it to other desktop environments it looks really conservative. I don’t like the idea of being conservative…

Brought to you by Michael, Mathias and the nice people at PTT (Turkish postal service).