Max Huang has been GNOME since 2010, starting with forming a GNOME users group in Taiwan. Max has a story you may understand: being a user, meeting the right person, and slowly finding yourself more and more deeply involved with a community in terms of working together and making friends.
Max Huang, on the left
Tell us a little bit more about yourself
I have contributed to GNOME for the past nine years. I promote free software and GNU/Linux at my school in Taiwan. I am one of GNOME.Asia Committee Advisors members, working with GNOME.Asia team.
I’ve helped organize several GNOME.Asia summits, in Taipei, Chongqing, Tokyo, India, Indonesia, Beijing, South Korea, and Hong Kong. I’ve served on the GNOME travel committee for several years. In 2012, I also worked with openSUSE and KDE to have a conference with COSCUP in Taiwan.
Before I started organizing events, I went to Bangalore, India, learned how to host the GNOME booth, and started making a GNOME user video.
Before that, I started the GNOME Taiwan Users Group, which hosted a lot of workshops with GTK, as well as a party for the GNOME 3 launch.
What is your role within the GNOME community?
I organize and promote GNOME. đ
Why did you get involved in GNOME?
I met Emily Chen at 2010, she led me into GNOME community. I am a GNOME user — of course. đ
Why are you still involved with GNOME?
The answer is “friendship and smiles.” To me, smiles are the greatest power to promote GNOME and FOSS. I have made many new friends in GNOME and FOSS through different events.
Why still get involved with GNOME and open source?
Everyone can be a contributor with different methods. Just spending your time — you will get smiles and friends, learn and grow.
What are you working on right now?
Promoting GNOME through open source, workshops, and speeches.
What are you excited about right now — either in GNOME or free and open source software in general:
Getting the community together more. đ
What is a major challenge you see for the future of GNOME?
We need to work on documentation and the first steps for getting users and organizers involved with GNOME. How can we brow the user and contributor bases?
What do you think GNOME should focus on next?
The GNOME Board tasks. đ I trust them, they will do their best. đ
What should we have asked you about that we didnât? (Please also answer.)
I think the question is great. Thanks again for interviewing me.
The Inclusion and Diversity team at GNOME was created to encourage and empower staff and volunteers, and to create an environment within GNOME where people from all backgrounds can thrive.
We welcome and encourage participation by everyone. To us, it doesnât matter how you identify yourself or how others perceive you: we welcome you.
Goals
Our main focus is to create an inclusive and diverse community. This means that we want to actively cultivate diversity in all forms, and to create ways to make people feel welcome and able to fully participate in GNOME.
In order to achieve that effectively we do activities like promoting diversity and inclusion throughout and beyond GNOME, educate ourselves and the GNOME community around creating welcoming and inclusive environments, organize events that are safe and welcoming to all, and offer internships and do outreach programs to promote diversity and inclusion at GNOME.
We just started the team this year, and have so far focused on making this yearâs GUADEC a more inclusive event. As a small part of that, we will be holding workshops on things like imposter syndrome and unconscious bias. We welcome ideas for future conferences and GNOME events!
How To Join
We welcome everyone who wishes to contribute to this mission! It will be a great pleasure for us to have you working with us for the cause. We currently meet every Wednesday on UberConference at 16 UTC. It would be great to see you there. For more info please visit the wiki.
Weâre moving forward with exciting new things for GTK, including completing the consistent layout manager for GTK 4. Weâre working on an API to make creating custom layouts easier. Focusing on usability across machines, weâve put a significant amount of work into memory usage, to help things run more smoothly on small and low-powered devices.
Weâre using GNOME!
Flatpak.org was running on Google Analytics, but that is no more! We are now using GNOME Matomo.
Inclusion, Diversity, and GNOME
GNOME is launching a Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiative to help the community become even better. They are working on revamping some web pages, working on the wiki, and putting together some special workshops and events to help people find their places within the community.
Check out the Annual Report!
Thanks to contributors, the board, and staff, we have a beautiful annual report that highlights what happened during the 2018 fiscal year. You can read it online.
## Meet the GNOMEies
This month we highlighted Sriram Ramkrishna. known around free and open source software communities as Sri.
Thank you!
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Sriram Ramkrishna, frequently known as Sri, is perhaps GNOME’s oldest contributor. He’s been around the community for almost as long as it’s been around!
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
I’m one of the oldest members of GNOME having recently past my 50th birthday. I started in GNOME in late 1997, at the time I was a storage engineer working for Intel. I remember feeling amused when someone in GNOME heard my background and asked whether Intel was going to be involved. They weren’t, but it turns out they did later. In fact, it’s because of GNOME that my work life changed from being a simple engineer to a multi-faceted person with not just technical skills but soft skills.
I’m well known in a number of other communities — free software community primarily, but also corporate open source thanks working 20 years at Intel.
What’s your role within the GNOME community?
I primarily do engagement work — social media, public relations, and talks in the community. But I also try help solve specific problems within the project. One current project I’m working on is to help improve the GNOME extensions. I have an on-going project to help with developer documentation using HotDoc. That’s been somewhat lagged and I hope to find time to help lead that effort again.
Why did you get involved in GNOME?
Miguel was a charismatic leader, and attracted me that way. Plus I hate C++, and GNOME was C based. đ But more than that, GNOME was a project that if you think about it was audacious in its purpose. Building a desktop in 1997 around an operating system that was primitive in terms of user experience, tooling, and experience. I wanted to be part of that.
Why are you still involved with GNOME?
Because GNOME is always a forward thinking project. There is still a lot of exciting potential and it’s like we’re only now getting started. The past 20 years was all about getting to the stage so that we can start doing some real innovation. We’ve reached parity with OSX and Windows — mainstream desktops. But now we can leverage the power of ideas even further.
What are you working on now?
Well, right now I’m involved in building a market for Linux applications. It’s no more audacious than the concept of GNOME itself. Five years ago, I had this idea that now that we had come up with ubiquitous app technology, that we can start working on building models that allow for compensation for free software developers, application stores so that developers can know how popular their apps are, and build relationships with the users who use their applications. A lot of this is encapsulated in a conference called Libre Application Summit. We did two iterations of that, and this year we’re expanding the scope and changing the name. Linux Application Summit will be a joint collaboration with KDE and hopefully distros in the future to help create the conditions needed to build modern, useful applications on a free software platform.
What are you excited about right now — either in GNOME or free and open source software in general?
Other than the conference. I’m generally excited about where GNOME is going. I think we have challenges to overcome and I’m excited about overcoming those challenges. In the FOSS community in general, there are challenges with encroachment by big business who I think are still trying to figure out how to exploit the labor of developers and we should ever be vigilant that we keep things fair and balanced between all parties.
What is a major challenge you see for the future of GNOME?
I think for GNOME as a platform, our challenge is to make sure that we have relevant documentation for users and developers. If there is one effort that I wish we could all participate in, it is that. It comes down to how low the barrier of entry is. How one picks one platform over the other is almost always depends on how quickly you can put together an application. Building a library of code, videos, and documentation is what will make GNOME successful. The second thing is that projects like GNOME Builder will also be critical to our success. I’m excited by the idea that I can build an application and have it be easily distributed everywhere and I don’t have to use arcane tools to do it.
What do you think GNOME should focus on next?
Documentation I think is going to be important, building relationships with other organizations and a very active foundation that will put their resources into building a solid infrastructure. So it’s not just one thing, but many.
Over the past few months, we’ve been building up the Foundationâs staff. In addition to executive director Neil McGovern and director of operations Rosanna Yuen, weâre thrilled to welcome:
Emmanuele Bassi, GTK+ core developer
Molly de Blanc, Strategic initiatives manager
BartĆomiej Piotrowski, Devops/sysadmin
Kristi Progri, Programs coordinator
Andrea Veri, Systems administrator
The election for the 2019-2020 board of directors is going on right now!
Where have we been?
In April we visited FOSS North in Gothenburg, Sweden and Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington, USA. Our table at FOSS North was staffed by Kristi and Neil, and volunteers Bastian, Anisa and Stefano. GNOMEie Zeeshan Ali presented on open source geolocation. Molly and Sri were at LFNW, where Molly spoke about following through on a code of conduct. Kristi participated remotely in FLISOL. There were two hackfests in May, Rust+GNOME 2019 Hackfest#5 in Berlin and Gstreamer Spring Hackfest 2019 in Oslo. We’ll be in Portland, OR, USA in July for OSCON. After OSCON weâll be hosting a West Coast Hackfest, July 18th â 21st.
Matthias Clasen is enjoys spending time outdoors, having great hair, and working on GNOME Tool Kit (GTK).
What is your role within the GNOME community?
I have been involved GNOME for a long time. My first commits to GTK are from sometime around 2002. GTK is where I spend most of my development and project maintenance time. But Iâve been involved in many other parts of GNOME at one point or another, from GLib to GNOME Software.
Apart from writing code and fixing bugs, I am a member of the release team, and do a few of the GNOME releases every cycle. In recent years, Iâve often done the .0 stable releases.
Other affiliations you want to share?
In my day job, I manage the âGNOMEâ part of the Red Hat desktop team, which is an outstanding group of engineers. We juggle upstream work on GNOME and related projects with maintaining the workstation products in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora.
Why did you get involved in GNOME?
That is a tough question to answer — these things usually just happen, and we try to retroactively make sense of them. To give some answer: My first love in software was typography — I spent my university years in Germany happily doing math and TeX. At some point, I got interested in window managers, and trying to write a better menu system for fvwm is what created my first contact with GTK. And things just grew from there, with many lucky coincidences along the way, not the least of which was that I got a job in the Red Hat desktop team.
Why are you still involved with GNOME?
On the one hand, it is part of my job (and I am extremely lucky that it is). But, really, it is just a way of life. There are so many good friends and colleagues in the GNOME community that I canât imagine not being involved in it anymore.
What are you working on right now?
It is always a mix of things that are going on at the same time. The big tasks are getting Fedora Silverblue ready for prime time and trying to push GTK4 over the finish line. But there are a whole lot of smaller things that take up some of my time. A few weeks ago, I took a day to write a Flatpak portal that lets applications update themselves. And last week I spent a day working with Behdad on pango (I still have a soft spot for typography) and wrote a post about it.
What are you excited about right now — either in GNOME or free and open source software in general?
I am feeling quite positive about Flatpak, and the opportunities it opens up for getting out of the âLinux distroâ conversation. It is exciting to see many apps on flathub that I had no idea existed. And now it is just one click for me to try them out. Together with gitlab and its CI, flatpak has also changed the way we develop GNOME. It is like night and day, compared to a few years ago — things generally just build and work these day, and you can download flatpaks to try out branches — it is fantastic.
What is a major challenge you see for the future of GNOME?
I think it is a challenge to teach generations the value of having a local computing device (e.g. your laptop) that is powerful and accessible enough to let you explore and build things. Between phones and the online world, there is a risk that we lose that important aspect of the freedom to tinker an explore — you donât compile things on your phone, and you canât reboot the cloud…
What do you think GNOME should focus on next?
I have a hard time answering this, because GNOME is thousands of individuals, who all have their own motivations and goals, not a monolithic block that can be turned in a different direction with a quick command. I think the work Endless has been doing for bringing computers (and GNOME) to people in the developing world and to young people is very relevant for the long-term future of the project, and we should support them.
What should we have asked you about that we didnât?
You could have asked me about my kids and my cats.
My kids are 21 and 19, and in college. Thankfully, they are both at home for the summer, so we can share the cooking and do some hiking and kayaking together.
The cats are not in college.
A lovely leaf Matthias found while hiking in the White Mountains.
I had the pleasure of coordinating GNOME and LibreOffice presence at ĂzgĂŒr Yazılım ve Linux GĂŒnleri (Free Software and Linux Days) 2018 in Istanbul, which took place between May 12 – May 13 in Bilgi University’s santralIstanbul campus. Here, I’ll try to share the GNOME part of the picture.
A view from the entrance of the event building
I am back at home after the Free Software and Linux Days 2018 in Ä°stanbul. It was a small and cozy event. The number of attendees was lower than the previous years, but on the plus side, we had more time for each visitor. It was also a good opportunity to break the ice between different segments of the Turkish Free Software community.
We had a nice booth, jointly run by GNOME Turkey ad LibreOffice Turkey community members, next to the Pardus booth. We gave out stickers to the visitors, answered their questions about GNOME, LibreOffice, and Free/Libre Software in general. Community members also had a lot of time to chat, and to discuss the current situation and the future of our community in Turkey.
GNOME and LibreOffice booths
We also had two GNOME related presentation/seminar sessions:
ĂzgĂŒr Yazılımları TĂŒrkçe KonuĆturmak (Making Free Software Talk Turkish), by Muhammet Kara
GNOME Recipe Uygulaması (The GNOME Recipe Application), by Emel Elvin Yıldız
And we now have all materials to set up a complete GNOME booth for any upcoming event in Turkey (thanks to The GNOME Foundation for funding the booth stuff).
Many thanks to all the visitors, attendees, and the organizers of the event! If you’re a GNOME user and you want to help promote it in your local region, consider joining the engagement team.
Had the pleasure to attend the GStramer Spring Hackfest taking place in Lund Sweden May 6 – May 4, here follow some reflections.
There is likely no overstatement that multimedia development is probably one of the more complex areas of software development so to be present while what must be some of the more competent in the domain hacking was quite an experience.
The atmosphere was intense focused, it almost felt like you could feel vibrations in the air.
Nirbheek and people busy hacking
Considered it good that many of the participants had an affection towards
GNOME (something to be for grateful/appreciative for).
Would be positive to attend a future GSteamer Hackfest.
Thanks to the local company Axis who provided the venue.
*The GNOME/GStreamer relationship is something to care about.
*There is no overstatement that the GStreamer community is a very knowledge & competent group of people which makes the alignment with GNOME valuable.
We have this week had the pleasure to interview Tanu Kaskinen about his work as PulseAudio maintainer
Do you want to introduce yourself?
Hello, my name is Tanu Kaskinen and I’m a PulseAudio maintainer (and also involved in the OpenEmbedded project a little bit). I spent my childhood in JĂ€rvenpÀÀ, Finland, and moved to Tampere when I started my software engineering studies at Tampere University of Technology. I’ve been living here ever since (13 years, if my calculations are correct).
How did you become involved with PulseAudio and why do you think itsâ an important project?Â
At a time (2007, I think) I had a MIDI keyboard, and I wanted to play along while listening to music in Rhythmbox. That required running software synthesizers with JACK, but I couldn’t make Rhythmbox work properly with JACK. PulseAudio seemed like the future of desktop audio, and Rhythmbox certainly worked with PulseAudio. There was a PulseAudio module for bridging to JACK, but that was glitchy, so I decided to try to fix it (my first open source code contribution attempt!). In the end my fix was not needed after Lennart rewrote big parts of the PulseAudio core.
Why is PulseAudio important? Well, you need some sound server to manage application streams, be that dmix (in ALSA), JACK or PulseAudio. Having an intermediary between the applications and the kernel is required for a lot of flexibility that people expect from their systems.
What are some of the challenges about maintaining PulseAudio?Â
I guess all projects have their set of difficult bugs… In case of PulseAudio, hardware specific issues are quite common. Not having the hardware yourself is of course one problem when debugging, but even if the issue can be tracked down to a clear misbehaviour in the kernel driver, the bug may be left unfixed, because I have never learned to work with kernel code, and the ALSA developers may ignore the bug report (I don’t really blame them, I believe ALSA is understaffed too).
Any interesting features that are being worked on right now?
Nothing earth-shattering comes to mind, but here are things that I’m personally excited about: Georg Chini has been working on a long-standing bluetooth bug about bad A/V sync when watching videos. Â
I believe the Intel HDMI LPE hardware is becoming pretty widespread on new computers, and the kernel driver for that has certain unusual behaviour that makes PulseAudio enter an infinite loop when the HDMI cable is not plugged in. I’m happy that it will be fixed in the upcoming release.
There have been various small tweaks to automatic routing in recent releases, and those are going to continue.Â
What keeps you involved in the PulseAudio community?
I feel a need to do something useful with my life, and maintaining PulseAudio fills that need quite nicely. It’s not always fun, but it’s not so un-fun either that I would feel compelled to quit. PulseAudio has been a significant part of my life for some 10 years, and at this point it’s a pretty big part of my identity.
Can you describe PulseAudioâs role/relevance in a desktop environment such as GNOME?
GNOME tries to make a computer easy to use, and things should “just work”. PulseAudio plays a big role in that when it comes to audio. Also, if the GNOME user interface designers or developers have a vision for how e.g. audio settings should be presented, they have to work within the capabilities of the sound server.
Are you yourself a GNOME user?
Yes I am! I started using Linux when Debian Woody was current, probably in 2003. I don’t remember how I initially chose GNOME, maybe just because it was the default? I’ve sticked with Debian and GNOME pretty much all this time .
Why are you doing a fundraiser?
Because I don’t want a real job đ I like having complete control over how I spend my time, and even if I didn’t feel so strongly about that, not many companies are willing to pay just for PulseAudio maintenance anyway. (Perhaps the number of such companies is even zero, but to be honest I haven’t tried reaching out to Red Hat or similar.)
In 2015 I found myself having enough savings to last at least a few years if I quit from my day job, and so I did. I wanted to spend more time on PulseAudio, because there was a shortage of maintainer resources in the project . In 2016 I launched the Patreon campaign to slow down the rate at which my savings are drained, and this year I started a similar campaign on Liberapay.
Questions for funÂ
What is your favorite place on Earth?
Well, there’s a certain quiet spot on the shore of the NĂ€sijĂ€rvi lake not too far from where I live. During summertime I sometimes go there to watch the sunset.
Favorite cake?
Hmm, I haven’t pondered this before, but I think the answer is the Swiss roll. Ideally with whipped cream and banana inside. I don’t know if I’ve ever eaten such Swiss roll, but I imagine that would be the optimal filling.
Thanks Tanu for taking time talking with us we wish you continued luck in your efforts!
To celebrate the successfully held GNOME Asia Summit 2017 in Chongqing, the Linux Story community saw the 3.28 release as a chance to promote GNOME and Open Source in China.
With its influence in many major cities of China, Linux Story called upon open source enthusiasts to gather in their local cities to hold a 10 cities get-together event to celebrate the new GNOME release.
A set of pictures from the events with pictures follow here to enjoy (received from Linux Story).
In Xian, a speech titled “A Brief History of GNOME” was presented, the presenter Ckj then showed new features of GNOME 3.28In Guangzhou, the party started with a demonstration of GNOME 3.28. Later Mr Li Ruibin, an experienced Linux user helped explain issues people face when using Linux and then introduced people to Flatpak.In Beijing, the party did not only offer a GNONME 3.28 demonstration, but also delicious pizzas by sponsors like SUSE and ZhongBiao Software.
In Yangzhou and in Shanghai the spotlight was on GNOME 3.28 demonstrations and the excitement was very high.
An excitement exciting gathering happened in the Mozilla sponsored community office place in Taiwan where apart from a demonstration of GNOME 3.28 Mr Zeng Zhengjia a local Translator shared a lot of his experience with translating earlier versions of GNOME. The picture tells a lot about the atmosphere.
We want to thank the Linux Story community for the initiative and wish them luck in their continued efforts. Initiatives like this are great to see.
Introduction
Goals
