Desktop Summit

Impressions/thoughts/rambling:

• Yay for Germans procedures! 😛 Like having to mark how many t-shirt were sold despite my experience that it doesn’t work. Still, these procedures resulted in a nicely run event
• At GUADEC we usually have a freakishly huge GNOME banner. Apparently this year it had to be taken down, which was done during a talk. I still don’t like that or get why this happened.



• Getting a tablet is great. Though noticed a lot of bugs in Meego and the light sensor on this hardware is really annoying. Tried updating Meego to a newer version and only the 3rd version I downloaded worked. In the other versions either the USB installer didn’t boot, or Meego didn’t boot.
• Alexanderplatz is awesome! Seems always something was happening around that place and elsewhere in Berlin.
• Overheard that press was interested in ‘juicy stuff’ between GNOME and KDE. Bit unfortunate. I think it is ok to make fun of things, e.g. trying to trick people by stating that either the Uncyclopedia GNOME article is the official goal for GNOME and similar things about KDE (loads of settings is always a nice one). I’d rather be misunderstood while being obviously sarcastic/trolling than having to phrase everything politically, but I don’t want it appearing as a ‘$PROJECT said this’ article either. But on the very plus side, didn’t notice any negative articles.
• Not totally sure about the frequency of the Desktop Summit versus GUADEC. This is not anything about not wanting to work together, but for me GUADEC is meeting the people I already know or haven’t met yet during last year. I almost don’t know anyone within KDE and if I talk to a Plasma developer I don’t have anything to talk about (which to me is logical and I don’t see anything wrong with this), while for anything within GNOME I usually have a good understanding. Further, there seems to be a bit of difference between Akademy and GUADEC in what usually happens during a conference. I haven’t been to any Akademy, but my idea about GUADEC is usually that there are talks, but the goal is to meet+plan+party. Focus was not so much on entire hacking days. Further, I like the unstructured choas (pants, stealing hats, turning vuntz’ icecream crazyiness into competitions, etc) that makes GUADEC. This Desktop Summit was in Germany though (procedures :P) and I haven’t been to the previous one so maybe my view is a bit off.
• Got the impression that there were way less GNOMEis around than usual, while I had the impression that there are more active developers than previously.
• Hopefully wrong, but got the idea that people working for Canonical seemed to feel uneasy and thinking now I at least forgot to greet seb128 except when running by in a hurry… though I am really terrible with remembering what affiliation people have (I also don’t care about affiliation).
• Transmageddon is awesome! Used it to convert the video files from my photo camera to webm.



• A 7 / 8 hour train ride is not so bad when I compare it to the many unneeded annoyances you have to deal with when flying. Delay of an hour on the way back, but still ok. Couldn’t sleep though.
• The black humour of the ‘state of the union’ talk is fun. Bit unfortunate having to say it is black humour / noticing talk being used as ‘GNOME developers say X’.
• Was invited to a KDE release team BoF. Really interesting. Gave a few comments on how things are done within GNOME. Though realized bringing a laptop was a bad idea (tends to distract me).
• Talk from Vincent Untz called Ramblings of a retired release manager was impressive. Hit a quite few sore points.



• Football and Volleyball competition was fun. Loads of people drinking beer while Germans were running tracks around us.



• Realized that not all hostels have a ‘common room’, which was the main reason for going to a hostel.
• Week went by quickly. Didn’t have a release-team meeting, didn’t see as much of Berlin as I intended, etc.