Rant of the day: well, at least Microsoft is making loads of money...

Sadly, many if not most of our schools today are suddenly pumping lots of extra money into Microsoft, Zoom and other proprietary software companies, because they need online collaboration. We all know there are many alternatives to giving their students' data away to foreign companies but most don't bother. It is annoying, there is always budget for Microsoft, but not for proper, local, privacy-protecting open source solutions, even if those are better. Why is that?

Reputation, I'm convinced, is the main reason for that.

We teach them the wrong thing

Unfortunately, a lot of people try to convince schools, governments, charitable organizations and even companies to not pay anything at all. They are promoting open source solutions as an alternative that is cheaper or free, which just makes it look inferior to management. They are not telling organizations to pay local and open source product companies instead of Microsoft.

Open source/Free Software advocates hammer on "but it is free"! And when they do, THEY probably think of Freedom. But the person they talk to just thinks "cheap and bad", no matter how you try to explain freedom. Nobody gets that, really, even if they nod friendly while thinking what a silly, idealistic nerd you are. Been there, done that.

I love the enthusiasm, yes, but in the end it is not helpful: it presents open source as a crappy but cheaper alternative without any real support. Well, there are a few overloaded volunteer enthusiasts who might do a great job for a volunteer but can't compete with a bunch of full time paid people at Microsoft. So the schools and governments and companies will simply use those 'free' (as in cheap and crappy) services as a stop-gap and then beg their bosses for budget to be able to pay a "proper" Microsoft service. There goes more public money in NOT public code.

We need to stop teaching companies that open source is a crappy, cheaper alternative to proper, paid alternatives from big American companies and instead tell them that they can pay for an open source solution that has real good support, no vendor lock-in, doesn't leak your data, protects your privacy and is actually better in many other ways. That way open source companies can actually hire people to make products better instead of just doing consulting one customer at a time.

And yes, some companies and some business areas have figured this out - Red Hat and SUSE are obvious examples, and projects like OpenStack have lots of paid people involved. But lots of other companies, from Bareos (backup) to Kolab (groupware) have struggled for years if not decades to build a product, instead getting sucked into consulting.

It doesn't work that way

I have seen loads of open source product companies go bankrupt or just give up and become consulting firms because their customers simply expected everything for free and to only pay a bit for consulting. Lots of open source people work at or set up their own consulting firms, occasionally even contributing a patch to upstream - but not building a product. Not that they don't want to, but they quickly find out that working your ass off for a maybe decent hourly rate does not leave you time to actually work on the thing you wanted to improve in the first place.

Indeed, you can't build a good end user product that way. Frank and myself put together a talk about this recently:



I have also recently written an article about this entire thing, explaining why of all the business models around open source, only subscriptions can lead to a sustainable business that actually builds a great product. Will hopefully soon be on opensource.com.

Yeah but volunteers...

Are fundamental to open source, yes, no doubt. At Nextcloud we could not have build what we did without lots of volunteers, heck, nearly everybody at Nextcloud was a volunteer at some point. And yes, all code we write is AGPL, and that, too is important. I am NOT arguing against that, not in the least.

What I say is:

• You can't build a great product without paid developers*
• You can't build a great product on consulting and only getting paid for setting it up/hosting

But let me then also add:

• You can build a better product collaboratively
• And the (A)GPL are the best licenses to do that

I'm sure there are exceptions to those rules, yes. But compare a great product like Krita, see how its developers struggle every day to be able to pay the bills of just a few full-time volunteers. Do you know how they are currently paying most of them? Last time I spoke to Boudewijn, the reality was sad: the Microsoft App store. Yup. How many does Adobe manage to pay to work on its products? Why should our ambition not be to have as many people working on Krita? Of course it should be. And yes, keep it open source. Is that doable?

Of course it is. Well, maybe not Adobe levels, but we can absolutely do better.

Missed opportunities

I said this was a rant, so I do have to complain a bit. My biggest regret is that KDE failed to catch up during the netbook period (around 2005). I believe that it is in no small part because we failed to work with businesses. Idealism can be super helpful and can also totally keep you irrelevant.

KDE is, lately, working more with companies, trying to build up more business around its product. GNOME has been far better at that for a far longer time, by the way. It is hard, and companies like Kolab, struggling for the last ~20 years to make things work, have shown that. Just being a for-profit obviously doesn't solve all problems. Idealism and hard work are not enough to make a business work. But we can do better, and Nextcloud is an example that shows we can. Now not all things are freaking awesome at Nextcloud, really - we work our a**** off and it is hard. We put on our best face in public but sometimes I just want to bang my head on and in the wall...

Still, see the video, read the blog hopefully soon on opensource.com - there are ways.

Thoughts welcome.

Edit:
* let me qualify that statement. You can do it without paid developers in a small project, I dunno, grep or ls or the awesome simplescreenrecorder and tools like that. With those there is a risk of the apps going unmaintained and new ones popping up all the time - look at music players in the KDE community. I'd rather see one well maintained than new ones pop up with all their different flaws, but I totally get that for a volunteer it is often easier and more fun to start fresh. In either case, once you start building something huge, it gets pretty hard without long term dedicated resources. Note that it can be donations-run (like Krita and many others), with a charitable organization. I do think it is about more than 'just' the resources. If somebody 'just' sponsored 25 people to work full-time on Nextcloud, the end result would be different than the situation today. The need to deliver something that makes customers happy (which means focus on details, scalability etc!) and pressure to do things you wouldn't want to do in your free time (developer documentation...) make a big difference.

In any case, I really don't think projects like LibreOffice, Firefox, Nextcloud, KDE or GNOME and the Linux kernel itself would be where they are today without people paid to work on them.

SCALE14x fun - openSUSE, KDE

Last weekend was SCALE and I had a lot of fun. Thought a report on the KDE/openSUSE presence would be good!


An impression from the trip - as in, Oslo->Los Angelos.


The event started with talks and I even managed to join the keynote by Corey Doctorow before heading to the booth!

openSUSE

If you didn't know it yet, now you do: both the KDE and GNOME booth are organized by openSUSE, and more precisely Booth Master Drew Adams. His energy makes, I think, openSUSE the most active community booth at FOSDEM with about a dozen volunteers (!!!). He keeps bringing in new people, amazing really. The corner booth worked out great though they wanted to try and move the openSUSE booth to be next to the SUSE one (which was sandwiched between Mageia and the FSF). Thinking about it now - it would have made SUSE pale in comparison...

Such a great presence at an event has a real impact in many ways, from introducing people to openSUSE and giving users a chance to chat about it to also showing people the Geeko matters and what it is up to. Plus, it's a great time for the team, too. So, awesome many points for Drew, really. Next time you see him: give him a hug!


The openSUSE Booth where visitors were thought about the Ways of the Geeko: Tumbling and Leaping!

KDE

I asked for volunteers in a blog some weeks ago and the good news is that people stepped up! Scarlett, who's working on becoming a Debian maintainer, as well as her Debian sponsor Diane, both stepped up to help out. Backbone of the booth this year was Barrington Daltrey who hasn't been representing KDE at SCALE for some years but decided to get back in the game again. A massive thanks to all three volunteers! I'm hoping that next year, Bert and Linda Yerke (who couldn't make it this year) are able to join again, we can have a real KDE party then! Especially as the Yerkes created some great swag last year (the awesome Konqi stickers!) and I have high expectations for what they might bring in 2017.

In any case, with these volunteers, the booth was staffed and lots of people could get their questions answered and had a place to leave their praise and thanks.


GNOME and KDE - brothers in arms!


Scarlett took a pic with me ;-)

Others

Of course, there was also the GNOME booth, well staffed and with demo devices. Walking over the rest of the exhibition hall, I spotted other distro's and projects. Elementary looked nice (their icons seem their biggest asset, seeing how they were promoted) and I talked to people at the Ubuntu booth. Their booth had a big Dell banner and two Dell employees to talk to about the Dell Developer Edition laptops. A great project and the team is doing an amazing job! Soon, the new Dell XPS devices will become available through the program and I'm thinking about getting one.

I must admit, though, that after putting the Dell XPS 13 next to my own Samsung np900x3c, the Samsung still feels sleeker, thinner, lighter, more durable. Sadly, the Samsung was a bit ahead of its time and battery life is a serious weakness. I take battery life over performance and big screens any time (not over ram, though, I want 16GB to stop running out of ram). So I'm hoping for a premium, Core M based (passively cooled) laptop from Dell, WITH Ubuntu on it. One can dream, right?


SCALE is tiring or relaxed, you pick.


Swapnil interviewing Elementary!

Besides the booths, there were also talks and lunches and dinners and conversations with loads of people


HP had only a magician at their booth. Fun, yes. But I prefer the real stuff ;-)

I'll next do an ownCloud-at-SCALE14x blog, but separate as that's where I spend most of my time and I thus have a lot to write about it!

LAX, SCALE, KDE, SUSE, GNOME and ownCloud

Lobby of the venue

Back home. Tired and jetlaggy, but satisfied: SCALE rocked!

SCALE loves ownCloud

The 13th South California Linux Expo was awesome! It is the biggest LinuxFest in the USA. While decidedly different in nature from Europe's biggest Linux event that that took place just three weeks prior (FOSDEM), we met similarly enthusiastic existing and future users. Conversations were also similar: about half the visitors already knew ownCloud, often using it or planning on deploying it; and the other half was more than a little delighted to hear about it, often exclaiming they had been looking for 'something like that' for a while. Negativity was extremely rare: I don't recall a single negative comment at SCALE (merely a few people who liked ownCloud but had no use for it personally), FOSDEM had one conversation starting unpleasantly but quickly turning around - even though one feature of ownCloud wasn't up to snuff, the user was happy with the experience as a whole.

Before the action started!

For most users, ownCloud was simply a wonderful product and they used it at home, deployed it for customers or managed it in their company. Some asked what features were coming or just arrived in ownCloud 8, or asked about the state of specific features and in more than one occasion they very enthusiastically told me how excited they were about ownCloud, how they loved it and how they were telling everybody to use it!

ownCloud to-go

Those who didn't know ownCloud were almost invariably surprised and excited. I can't count the times I heard "wow, why did I never hear about this before" and "dude, I've been looking for something like this for ever!". Often, people wondered how long ownCloud had been around (we just turned five), if it was open source (yes, with love), how many people contributed to it (719 and counting) and how many users it has (we guestimate over 2 million, with 500,000 in this single deployment alone). Oh, and, does it scale? The deployment linked above and a mention of users like CERN can put most concerns to rest. Yes, ownCloud scales from Raspberry Pi to Atom Smashing size.

What came up a few times as barriers to their future usage of ownCloud was pretty much what I discussed before. Running a server at home is not easy and I walked by the EFF booth to ask about progress on Let's Encrypt to ask about the progress of solving one aspect of that problem: more easily getting SSL certificates. I was told the project is on track for the 2nd half of this year.

Frank and Bryan Lunduke

It is wonderful to have such energizing, positive, enthusiastic users - and to have such an enthusiastic booth crew to talk to them as well. At the booth we had Frank, Matt, Ron, Camila and myself. Awesome it was and we had great fun! Below a timelapse video of Saturday morning. It was still rather quiet but it is nice to see us jump around!

Stuff and talk

Just like at FOSDEM, we brought ownCloud stickers, hand outs explaining ownCloud to users and developers as well as some posters for the booth and pins to give out. This was all very much appreciated - I estimate we gave out about 400 hand outs and 500 or so stickers as well as about 50-100 pins.

Sunday at 3PM, I gave a talk about Privacy and ownCloud, with Frank finishing off with a section about his talk at MIT where he discussed ownCloud's Federated Cloud sharing feature and where it is going. The talk was well received; I think the angle I took to privacy (inspired by my background in psychology) spoke to the audience and Frank's description of federation and how it's done in ownCloud was very interesting. owncloud.org and owncloud.com will feature blogs with some more information about this soon.

Friends

Big, big booth!

I also walked by the booths of 'old friends' - the openSUSE/GNOME/KDE crew in particular, it was awesome to meet them. Some I hadn't seen in years, others I met for the first time. They did an amazing job and richly deserve the reward they earned for most Stunningly Amazing Booth Crew (don't know the real name of the booth award but that's what it should be). If you think that 'just' GNOME an KDE being incorporated in the openSUSE booth isn't enough - Master Planner of the Booths Drew aims to bring in Enlightenment and XFCE as well next year. Supposedly a Trello board has been set up already. I bet it won't be long before it has grown to the point where the SCALE organization needs to give the 'openSUSE booth & friends' a separate hall at SCALE...

I have to note that it was thanks to our green friends that I could hang up the ownCloud flyers - they lend me some (green!) tape to do that.

The KDE booth had a bunch of terribly cool stickers (I only now realize I forgot to get one for myself!) as well as the "frameworks 5" flyers. I could only bring, like, 5 t-shirts and a dozen old 'join-the-game' flyers so I'm glad Bert Yerke and his wife, who formed the awesome local KDE team, had created the other materials. We already discussed 2016, as they have plenty of ideas on how to improve the booth!

Awesome stickers...

If you, dear reader, want to help out at the KDE or ownCloud booth next year - let me know, either in the comments or by mail. I can promise you: it is awesomely fun and by far not as scary as you might think! Bert and Matt and everybody who has ever been at a KDE, openSUSE, ownCloud or other FOSS booth can attest to that: it is a great way of getting involved and making a big difference!

Bonus points for who finds a suitable meaning for the one item in the title which isn't yet an acrynym ;-)

Consensus decision making

Jono blogged about respect in community discussions. I have zero to say on the storm-in-a-teacup (his words) that started it other than, perhaps, suggest that when there are waves, there is wind. But whatever direction that wind blows, I'd like to focus on something else. Jono made the following statement:

Ubuntu is not a consensus-based community. Consensus communities rarely work, and I am not aware of any Open Source project that bases their work on wider consensus in the community.

I'm not entirely sure what he means with consensus and community here. He himself defines community as "a collection of people (or animals) who interact with one another in the same environment". Consensus decision making, according to Wikipedia, is:

"a group decision making process that seeks the consent of all participants. Consensus may be defined professionally as an acceptable resolution, one that can be supported, even if not the "favourite" of each individual"

Talking consensus

Let me take this as an opportunity to address a common misconception about consensus: that consensus means full agreement. The Wikipedia entry already points out that the outcome has to be 'acceptable', one that 'can be supported'. This matters: Jono probably meant to say that there is no sizeable community where everybody fully agrees on every decision and I can't imagine he is wrong on that. But that is not what consensus means.

(dis)agreement

The reality is that in a large and diverse group of people, it is impossible to really reach full agreement on any sufficiently complicated matter. Making decisions on agreement of all participants thus doesn't work. Consensus, instead, allows a decision to be made even in the face of disagreement. Essentially, it is a form of democracy without voting.

Ever heard the phrase: "Let's agree to disagree"? That is it: at some point in a decision making process, consensus requires some of the participants to be mature enough to step out of the way and let a decision actually get made. And others need to respect them for that.

Voluntairy

What makes consensus different from voting?

Usually, those in a small minority are the ones who have to (wo)man up and accept that the decision and project is more important than them. The main difference between voting however, where minorities (anything below 50%, usually) don't get their way, is that it is not mandatory. In some cases, the minority can get their way and it can be the majority which steps back and lets them. And even if that doesn't happen, the difference between being forcefully over-ruled and gracefully accepting that you can't always win is big.

A second key point is that ruling by consensus requires discussion, much more than voting does. You can't make decisions by consensus without informing people of the choices - you have to know what you (dis)agree with. Certainly, a community where a few take decisions without talking about it does not decide based on consensus.

Last, the two are not incompattible. It makes all the sense in the world to occasionally do an 'opinion poll' (as opposed to doing a decisive vote) to aid the decision making process. This is valuable input for a consensual decision: vocal supporters of either side can create rather distorted views on how strong the support for a certain opinion really is.

Trust and respect

So I think Jono is wrong when he states that there are no communities which decide based on consensus - KDE is an example of one, Gnome does it often and it's pretty much the way of the Geeko, too. Others usually prefer to vote (Debian) or have a more top-down structure like Ubuntu. There are many ways to Rome, as they say. Being aware of that is a good thing - and being dismissive of ways other than yours is not.

I want to add that Valerie Zimmerman made an excellent argument for the importance of trust and respect. No structure of decision making works without these - trust that those who disagree will have the courage to agree-to-disagree, trust that the majority is right or trust that those who decide for you make the right decisions. And respect each other while debating it.

On Innovation, Free Software, NIH, Geary, Trojita and KDE PIM

I argue that if Free Software wants to get anywhere, it needs a culture of 'collaboration first'. In most areas, we have that. In some, we don't - and that is hurting. The desktop is probably a prime example of that.

Rob Boudreau wrote an opinion piece about Personal Information Management (PIM) and the future. He concludes that 2013 has different requirements from PIM than 1995, and:

"KDE PIM seems to be the only FOSS project working on technology that will eventually go beyond just the PIM itself"

I think reality agrees with him. Mobile devices are cleverly integrating chat, email, social media and phone in one. Contacts have details on all of these and show the latest tweet or Facebook message of that person as status. Why doesn't the desktop do this? Well, it does, but only by putting your data on corporate servers, accessible though web browsers: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, ...

The Linux Desktop has a mission here: help keep user data out of the greedy hands of Google, Facebook and Microsofts! That can only be done by building on the shoulders of giants, not by re-inventing the wheel out of sheer arrogance. Let me explain what I mean.

Collaboration

10 years ago I often presented to people new to Free Software and how we work. I would explain the benefits of Open Source so:

"Imagine you thought of the best New Idea for word processing. From now on, documents will almost write themselves. But you first have to embark on the huge journey to write a full word processor. Three years later, your amazing application does not get anywhere as it can't open MS Word files."

"Imagine instead you added your amazing feature to an existing word processor. The discussion with the experienced word processor developers even resulted in a better result!"

Being able to stand on the shoulders of giants is an important benefit from collaboration in Free Software. We do have competing projects but note that most successful forks and rewrites were started due to a lack of collaboration! A recent example is LibreOffice. Often people from the 'original' project join or even start the fork or rewrite. Wayland is build by the Xorg team and the MySQL fork MariaDB is led by the founder of MySQL!

The Linux kernel is another great example. Google, for example, is putting in enormous resources in getting their technologies back into the kernel. After a period of forking for the benefit of speed and efficiency, they figured out that in the long run, it actually is more efficient to not fork and put in the extra effort in collaboration.

Collaboration-by-default is not a given. Aaron Seigo said about KDE:

"The open nature of the community has purged the “not invented here” syndrome from our ranks"

Yes, the KDE community has a strong tradition of re-using efforts and building on the shoulders of giants. And questioning those who don't! But such a culture took years to build as there is plenty reason to NOT collaborate.

Reasons for not collaborating

Failing forks or duplicating projects are often based on personal conflicts or a dislike for certain toolkits, languages or technical choices. And there is much starting from scratch because developers just focus on their own problem or want to learn something new.. While I would argue that you probably learn more working with experienced, competent people, and you might get more done, too, it is not hard to understand these reasons.

Then, there is psychology. Most people think they are smarter than average and programmers are no different (sometimes expressed as "what others do is easy")... Given the bell-curve followed by the distribution of intelligence, this clearly is one of the many fallacies our brain saddles us with. Even companies are affected. Google, working to get their features into the upstream kernel, discovered that not all the intelligent people in the world work for them and there is lots of room for improvements in what their team came up with.

More than one mail client

I argue that this last reason leads to more duplication of effort than healthy in the area of mail clients. Recently, Yorba pushed to get funding for Geary, another 'new approach to mail'. And there is Trojita, also providing a great IMAP client. Both projects were started in the last couple of years and seem to be re-inventing the wheel -- twice. As you probably saw many prominent developers giving a hard time to a company insisting upon writing another display server, I hope you understand how misguided I think this is. Yorba said they decided to write a new email client to keep things simple and fast and due to the complexity of other mail clients... I described the rationale and wrongness of this "let's write a new mail client" approach in a comment on LWN a while ago. In short, I'm betting that the reasons behind it boil down to the previously mentioned combination of over-estimating oneself and underestimating the problem. In the case of email probably a lack of ambition and forward-thinking as well. Just email doesn't cut it in 2013, certainly not 5 years from now.

Bringing conversation-view to email is an awesome idea - and can probably be done through a Google Summer of Code project within an existing client. Writing an entirely new email experience needs a bit more effort of course, but writing the entire underlying infrastructure too - that is just a sodding waste of time, pardon my French. Good to see Trojita at least has joined the KDE community and is working with KDE PIM! How about you, Geary?

More than one conference

I've always been a big proponent of the Desktop Summits and I do indeed think that it shows both arrogance and a lack of big-picture thinking that these don't happen anymore. I'm glad that the KDE board, including Agustin (who organized the first Desktop Summit) managed to kick off a "freedesktop summit" at the SUSE offices. I'm also glad that some people who DO see the benefit of collaboration participated there - even if their communities don't (yet) understand that it is worth the investment.

What we need

We need a culture where we are critical of people who don't try to work together or are unwilling to put in effort to collaborate. Free Software depends on collaboration and not working together is just counterproductive. So I'd like to ask all readers to support collaboration: talk about collaboration, share the tales of success. And if somebody decides to write an app from scratch, or is writing an application doing the same thing another does - question them, ask why they go it alone, why not collaborate. It is totally OK to be critical of forks and anti-collaborative behavior. You don't have to beat anyone up, but at least making them think about it is a good thing. And if you're a developer: integrate technologies, build re-usable libraries. And remember that the shoulders YOU are standing on can be made stronger for future generations of Libre developers! Just dumping disconnected code is NOT a contribution to Free Software, contrary to what some folks seem to think.

I'd also like to ask people to support KDE PIM: if we want to have a shot at keeping our data out of greedy corporate hands and if we want to ever get onto the corporate desktop, Akonadi is the only architecture that really has a shot. Instead of writing new wheels, let's improve this one together! Yes, KDE PIM needs UI work. Then why not do that? Writing a new mail client makes total sense - if you build it on a proper infrastructure. The KDE PIM team is greatly looking forward to help people who want to write new mail, RSS, Facebook or contact management applications. Skills required are mostly related to motivation and the willingness to ask questions and get help - otherwise, javascript coding skills will probably get you pretty far as it makes all the sense in the world to write these new UI's in QML.

Concluding

I'm happy to concede that things are not black and white. I'm sure nobody can fully judge neither Geary nor Trojita or all aspects of the Desktop Summit. Mea culpa for any wrongness. But please take the lesson to heart: there is great value in collaboration. And getting these benefits means putting in 'extra' efforts, yes, it can cost you something in the short run - that is the whole point of long-term vs short-term thinking. So, next time somebody argues that 'we can go faster if we do it alone', tell them that most smart people do NOT work for you and problems are always simple when they're not (yet) yours. Or just remind them that once upon a time, people thought volunteers could never write a encyclopedia. It is the 21st century and collaboration is what sets apart winners from losers.

Take care!

Re:Publica

About two weeks ago I went to Re:Publica, a hipster event (can I say that?) in Berlin. It was an interesting event - related to the stuff I usually visit, yet different. I'll go over the differences, then present what I see as the challenge for Free Software events: get those creative, digital and always-online people closer to us!

Audience

The main audience of the event could probably be best described as people interested in the 'digital lifestyle'. People who use smartphones, are always on-line. They find their places-to-go on foursquare, talk to their friends on facebook, share their opinions on twitter, Whatsapp with their love - but they don't hang out on IRC or visit forums very often and they probably have a Macbook Air and a high-end android phone. Yes, not that different from us.

Subjects

The event featured talks on things like the web, new cloud services like on-line music and creativity like music and video tools, open video etcetera. But that was only about 10-20%. Another 20-30% was about the future - social media, social innovation and more. To my surprise, the remaining 50% of the talks was about Freedom - and I use the capital for a reason. The Occupy movement, Digital Restrictions Management, Net Neutrality, Open Data, Digital influence on revolutions, eco-journalism, (internet) governance. Very close to what we, the Free Software community, hold dear (and find interesting!) Yes, not so different from us.

Marketing and artwork

You can imagine - an event organized by hipsters creative people looks good. It does! Team t-shirts were sponsored by spreadshirt and had the title 'actionist'. There was a big wall with the program, using pictures of the speakers, QR codes and more weird stuff. A twitter stream on a screen is old, people. Here, if you tweet a hash-tag you get your face as part of a logo shape or you get a gift if you check in with foursquare. That's more like it. Oh, and they had a 'carry your own chair' program - not unlike we did at the last openSUSE conference at the end of each day, except that it was 'cool', not 'please help us out with moving chairs'!

There were other things, too. Interesting or just plain weird stickers - with just a QR code or a shortened link, or only a slogan. There was stuff like a live steaming camera so you could interact with people on-line (easy to do: a laptop with a webcam connected to a google hangout?!?) and plenty of other good ideas. Surely different from what we usually do!

Challenge for us?

I lately have been feeling that Free Software is loosing the battle for the hearts. Privacy and security are not important, internet is just a tool. We've been trying to educate people about Freedom but they don't care.

I was wrong. Collaboration and Freedom DO matter and people know it. We just don't reach the most of those who care about these things. This is where our challenge lies!

After talking with others and thinking about this, I conclude that there are two things we have to do better:

Positivism. We have a tendency to 'lecture' about the dangers of DRM, closed standards, government control and other things. Wake up! Look around you! Online Collaboration has given us Wikipedia. Online Communication has supported revolutions in the Middle East. Social Media gave us the Occupy Movement. And everyone's using Android phones. Yes, there are challenges, but let's celebrate our successes too! Relevance. We often are perfectionists. Build alternatives instead of interfacing with what's out there. But most people don't care that much for a slightly more secure system if it makes getting the latest stuff harder. People don't care about a perfectly free Cloud solution if it's more difficult or doesn't work with what they have. We must realize that a Can do attitude gets us far further than a Can't do way of thinking. And we have to make sure that what people care about is what we care about. Talking to others, sharing data, working with what's out there and checking if what we do has real-world value!

Concrete

At least at the conference's I'm involved in I'll be trying to broaden the audience a bit and attract people outside of our usual circle. By changes to the program (workshops on Krita, Gimp, Blender, Kdenlive and Inkscape? ownCloud? web stuff? Talks about Wikimedia, the EFF, net neutrality, copyright?) and by advertising/spreading the word in less usual places (maybe an Apple fan magazine or a design paper). Let's see if we can get more people to see what we do, get involved, care!

Awesome images by Renehamburg on flickr

On the value of collaboration

I finished my monthly column for Linux User last night - way late, as usual. It was about a number of projects openSUSE has going on to improve software installation. Porting Ubuntu Software Center to PackageKit, website integration in OBS, the improved online software store and last but not least the release of the snapper website. And I noted that all of these are cross-distribution: we're not just trying to improve openSUSE, we're trying to improve all Free Software. And it's not just us - I feel there is more and more collaboration in the Linux space (not that there aren't exceptions of course).

As conclusion, I wrote that

I personally believe that any project which fails to have this ambition will fail to really make a difference in the long run. Free Software is not just about 'abiding by the rules of the GPL' - it is about working with others.

What happens if you don't collaborate?

Let's talk about that. Who remembers Xandros? Linspire? They once were quite popular Linux distributions. So, they contributed a lot back to Free Software, right? Not really... They didn't work up-stream, instead, they built unique features like the Xandros Filemanager and Linspire's software management tools. Sounds familiar? right...

So, I believe that if you try to isolate yourself from the rest of the Free Software world, you're not only doing yourself a disservice, but all of Free Software. You can claim you contribute - lots and lots. Bringing in new users, making things simpler for end users (that's what Linspire and Xandros said, yes). But if you don't do it in a collaborative fashion, you have to carry more and more load yourself. Red Hat and Novell learned that the hard way - and now both companies have a strong policy: nothing goes in unless it is upstream. Yes, that benefits Free Software, of course. It's how we work. Even Google gets that and puts in significant resources to get their changes in the Linux kernel.

If you don't do that - you're work is irrelevant for the future of Free Software. Distribution-specific package managers are a great example: any distro hopper who has been around for a while can't count the different tools he/she has been using on two hands anymore. I know I can't. Most of these were cool, really. And most are dead code these days. Let me repeat:

non-collaborative efforts fail to make a difference for Software Freedom in the long run

But... but... but...

You'll say: but the code is free! Yes, it is. Which is about as valuable as... Let's see - how many distribution-specific package managers have been ported to others? Exactly. Very few. And most of those have very quiet lives. You say - but Linspire did lots of marketing. We brought new users in contact with Linux. That's cool, don't get me wrong. But at the same time they were channeling effort to a small world-on-its-own instead of directing these people towards understanding the wider ecosystem. It's not the number of users that counts, but what you do with it.

Collaboration is not easy - I really applaud the efforts of dantti who's putting in lots of hard work to improve the situation in the software installation area. I really look forward to the day openSUSE uses Apper as the one and only package manager on KDE desktops (we're working on making Ubuntu Software Center PackageKit based for GNOME desktops). And I call on other Linux Distributions: put your efforts in a place where it matters. Collaborate. Especially those calling themselves proudly KDE distributions - put your efforts where your mouth is... KDE's a very open, collaborative project and this is a real step forward for Free Software!

Of course, the same goes for GNOME projects. Ubuntu Software Center is a nice piece of software and if we make it work on top of PackageKit it's not hard to adopt it. Port it to GTK3, integrate it in GNOME shell, make it better for all of us. Maybe, some day, even Canonical will see the light and collaborate...



Edit: Before going live, I added this as 2 reviewers of this blog pointed this out:

• Canonical fans might think that as usual this is all about them.
  It's not, actually. Surely Canonical is a great example of the next Lindows - no company stays around forever. Some day, SUSE won't be around either - nor will Red Hat. And as I said I believe that without collaboration with others there will be no 'legacy' - but the desperate attempts by Mark to justify the lack of collaboration wasn't what prompted this blog. It was actually the positive side of things - the work openSUSE does, of course, but also Fedora (Kevin Kofler worked on a cross-distro GSOC project last year) and the awesome debian-screenshots people. And many people around GNOME and KDE - those smart enough to realize that collaboration makes Free Software stronger and building your own garden makes it weaker.
• But who cares about the benefit to Free Software?
  I do. But if you don't, I don't judge. Most people don't care much about a great deal of things others do care about. From puppies to privacy invasions to dictatorships to hungry children. You can't care about everything and if a Linux distro does what you need from it, despite not working with others and you couldn't care less, why do you even bother reading my blog?

Saturday!

Took a day off yesterday and visited a museum in Berlin. That didn't work out so awesomely as it turns out I need far more time than the average human (like Camila, although I wouldn't call her average in most regards). So I had only seen the special exhibition and a part of the Islamic stuff before being kicked out as the day was over. The biggest thing I missed was the awesome ancient Greek section which had the 'big things' (see pic below). I was chased through the section on my way to the exit and I must say that it was truly impressive. I'll be going back to that museum.

Afterwards we went to have 'Brazilian' food in Cafe de Brasil. The food was OK - what I had wasn't great (come on, 'Churrasco'? That?) but Camila's dish was quite authentic.

Gnome Shell, Lydia, flamewars

Lydia Pintscher is visiting today and as she's KDE board member this has to be the day I move my laptop over to GNOME Shell. zypper doing it's thing right now :D

Lydia hasn't seen Popcorn yet, that'll be fun. Let me trow in a picture :D

She said she's bringing cookies, let's see if those are popcorn-cookies or Camila/Jos cookies... In any case, I'll be cooking.

Speaking of cooking, there's another huge thread brewing on the openSUSE-Factory mailing list... This time, the KDE folks got jealous of the GNOMIES who can flame away on GNOME Shell vs Unity vs Cinnamon vs XFCE vs Mate, and started a discussion on KDE 3 vs KDE 4. I'm awaiting for Razor-qt to join the fight :D

I do feel a bit bad joining in knowing it's the absolutely wrong mailing list for this, but hey, it's Saturday, there's fun to be had...

Now for those who like pictures, here's Popcorn again, this time it's us on our balcony:

From the Home album

DesktopSummit about to start!

I'm already late to be at Humbolt and help the team to prepare for the arrival of many hundreds of Free Software desktop* contributors.

For those who missed the mail by Claudia with some last minute information, let me include the most important stuff:

• Pre-regisration starts at 16:00 at C-base, coolest place in Berlin. Be there for a badge and beer! If you can't make it you can register on Saturday but you'll have to enter the building via the back ;-)
• Lunch vouchers for food at the uni cost 17 euro
• Yes, bad weather here, lots of rain. Get Umbrella's...

For more info, see the the desktop summit wiki and here. Contact info can be found here.

Have a good trip if you're not there, and if you've arrived already, enjoy your stay!!!


*I'm unsure what to say these days - "desktop" doesn't cut it, but "UI" or user interface is too vague, user experience too fancy, "desktop/mobile" too long etc etc etc...

KDE release on Radio Antwerp

As usual lots going on. I haven't mentioned it anywhere yet, so: congrats to all KDE peeps for the release of SC 4.7 ;-)

I presented the release on Radio Antwerp Centraal a few days ago. I had helped out a bit with the release announcement but hadn't had a recent look so I had to catch up to the major highlights quickly. Worked out great, though. Also discussed Tumbleweed and GNOME with the radio dude. Not sure what the initial plan was but I found myself talk for a full program in the end... Surprise, huh?

On the other side of the world I went to CLS last week. Still have to turn my notes into something readable - struggling with crappy sleep, family visits and other time-eating things. And the DS is upcoming... But I'll blog about this later, promise!

Time to register!

The Desktop Summit is getting closer. That means you really need to start planning travel and hotel and of course - register!

We need to plan our event properly, and for that we need the visitors to register in time. We might not be able to get you network access or have room for you in the social events like parties or trips if you don't register in time, so it's in everybody's interest if you do :D

If you're still wondering if you should go, remember this: if you are interested in the Linux Desktop, this is THE place to be. All key players are there! You can get to know them, learn, share thoughts and ideas.

And not to forget, we have a STUNNING line-up of talks, awesome keynote speakers and of course much much more.

So go, register today!

DS call for participation: BoF's and Workshops

The Desktop Summit schedule for the talks and presentations has been published a couple of weeks ago. Now Jon announced that it's time to start sending in sessions for workshops, BOF's and hack/teaching sessions! The dot has a more extensive announcement.

The important points:

All forms of hands-on activities that aim to further the Free Desktop are welcomed. Examples of such sessions include BoF, project and cross-project meetings, workshops, hacking sessions and training/teaching sessions. Each session is self-organized and it is up to the hosts and participants to decide if the session is to be loosely oriented around a set of topics, or have a well-defined agenda.

Each session is meant to be open to anyone who is interested, if you want to organize a closed session on a subject, contact the organisation (details below). We encourage participants to make use of the fact that the Desktop Summit will bring together people from several different communities, and the unique opportunities this creates.

And:

The deadline for pre-registered sessions is July 3rd. Sessions registered before this time will be scheduled by the organization team between July 3rd and July 10th.

For sessions registered after this date, attendees themselves are responsible for finding a time and location for the session. Rooms will be available for this for the duration of the Workshop & BoF days, and the wiki can be used to coordinate.

This means that if you schedule in advance we can make sure there is no overlap between these sessions or talks and that the order makes sense. For example, first a talk introducing QML, then a workshop on QML & Plasma, then a hack session to write some applets. If you don't schedule now, you run the risk of having a BoF at 9 in the morning the day after a party, too :D

Note that obviously, you can't be sure yet about the topic of some sessions. Especially BoF's are supposed to be about relevant, recent things. So you're not expected to have a perfect topic yet, a rough outline is enough!

Now, go forth and shoot in a BoF, workshop or similar Read-Write session!

The Collaboration Imperative

As you might have noticed, there is a little bit of a brush-up between GNOME and Canonical with KDE involved from the sidelines (just read Planet GNOME). Dave wrote a reasonable summary of this and so did Jeff Waugh in his series on the relationship between Canonical and GNOME. In three sentences:

Let's have a fight

Canonical gets a lot of criticism for creating a fork of the GNOME experience with Unity, instead of contributing upstream to GNOME Shell. Canonical responds that Unity was meant to be a GNOME project and their contributions are being blocked (giving libindicators as example). Suddenly Aaron Seigo from KDE weighted in, saying GNOME is indeed hard to work with.

I've been reading up on it and to some extend participating in the discussion on identi.ca. As you know, I'm interested in the subject of collaboration and this is a case where it clearly didn't work out for a variety of reasons. In this blog I won't try to weight in on the topic itself but rather argue that the psychological construct of "the fundamental attribution error" can explain much of the conflict and how to avoid it.

But let's start with a sample of the discussion.

forming an opinion

I'm not exactly the type of person who makes up his mind easily. And the stories that came out of this debate were highly conflicting and confusing. According to this, Canonical discourages its employees from contributing upstream. However, Aaron claims GNOME does not WANT to collaborate. And Mark blogs:

Jeff also goes on to talk about Ted and Aurelien, who were proposing the app indicators work in GNOME and KDE respectively. KDE apps worked smoothly, Gnome rejected Ted’s proposal.

I say opinions are cool!

So GNOME is uncooperative? Or does Canonical not get it, as Dave claimed? Is KDE just pushing things without listening? Depends on your point of view - the facts are vague. Read for example this thread on freedesktop.org about the StatusNotifier (systray) spec - there is about a 50% chance you'll decide KDE is the uncooperative one... This thread was referenced several times as proof Party X was inflexible and rude - where X was sometimes GNOME and sometimes KDE!

Makes you wonder what is going on...

So what is real?

A few days ago I had a call with Jeff Waugh. He offered to talk in a dent and I'm glad he did. Of course, as usual the whole situation is more complicated than what you can discuss in 140 characters on twitter. The talk was very enlightening and made me think of a psychological concept.

Call it a family trait...

The fundamental attribution error

People tend to attribute what happens around us in the world to intentions. We believe things happen for a reason. This is quite a strong human tendency already present in very young children. Put a 3 year old in front of a room where stones are moved around by some invisible means like magnets. Ask the kid what is going on and he or she will describe the events in the room in terms of "the blue stone wants to talk to the red one". We know stones usually don't really want a lot - so why does the child perceive such intentions? This phenomenon not only forms the base of early religions (attributing 'intentions' to weather, trees or growth of crops) but also results in making conflicts worse. Psychologists call it "the fundamental attribution error" and it is fundamental (hence the name) to our perception of the world.

So the reality is, besides that stones and trees don't have 'goals' and 'intentions', that often things happen for other reasons than someone having the intent to do that specific thing. Or in English, if a specification gets critical comments - maybe the respondent might have had other reasons than just wanting to be a jerk. Like being busy, tired or having misunderstood/missed a part of the discussion.

Reality?

Reality applied

The talk with Jeff made clear that the major reason for GNOME not supporting the systemtray spec was timing, not lack of interest The focus of the GNOME project right now is understandably narrow: get GNOME 3 out the door. Something like interoperability, no matter how important, is not on top of the agenda. Jeff said he expects the FD.o systray spec to be supported hopefully in GNOME 3.2! The lesson: sometimes things interfere with cooperation. And the 'other camp', blissfully unaware of the real reasons behind lack of response or rude behavior, attributes it to a lack of willingness and support.

As another example, take the adoption of the Galago (notification) specification and what went wrong according to this message by John Palmieri. And about GNOME and Canonical having misunderstandings: Stuart Jarvis blogged how hard understanding a Free Software community can be.

Now I'm not going to attempt to unravel all the events that led to this blog as that would simply be impossible. Nor will I attempt to figure out 'who is to blame' as that's pointless (and wrong anyway, as I argued above). What I can do is ask those involved to think about the fundamental attribution error: if someone looks funny at you, it doesn't mean they hate you. They might have something stuck in their eye!

*snap*

Actions

Ok, so maybe the others don't hate you. That doesn't solve the problem - yet. We all need to step up and do something. What?

Make collaboration an explicit focus

I wrote about collaboration before and at FOSDEM there was a cross-distro-collaboration discussion. As I said there, a big blocker for more openness is that we simply don't think about collaboration. We need to be aware of the opportunities for and benefits of collaboration. The whole discussion that I started this blog with might be negative and things are all a bit tense right now, but it shines the spotlight on something that needs attention! And positive initiatives like Appstream are happening. As Seif Lotfy wrote on his blog:

And if you haven’t noticed we are working with GNOME Shell, Unity and KDE. So a sense of collaboration is possible ;)

It just needs us to take notice! So, Mark, maybe blog about Appstream? It's using Ubuntu Software Center for the GNOME side, after all... Let's also focus on the positive projects!

Talk together face to face!

It is important to talk about concerns and frustrations. Considering the distance Brazil-Australia the best Jeff and I could do was a phone call but it was certainly enlightening. And I bet that you'll notice the same when you finally get to talk to those you've been fighting with on IRC and mailing lists for so long... Even then, realize that one single person does not define his or her whole project. Not everyone in KDE is as jumpy as Aaron; not everyone in GNOME is as French as Vincent Untz. It is important to share the results of a chat as well - blog about it (if your blog is aggregated on your projects' planet), or add results to a wiki or commit logs etcetera. Make sure the positive results persist!

Allison wrote he also wants to start a bit of a discussion in the cross-desktop area which I welcome and support. Sounds like something which could make an impact and Allison, if you want my help, let me know what I can do.

Time for a group hug?

Take advantage of events to meet

Don't overlook the opportunity to meet at events. For example, there is the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit in San Fransisco in a few weeks. It is co-located with Camp KDE which seems to me an excellent opportunity for stakeholders to get together. Go a few days before the Collaboration Summit starts so you can get some face to face time with desktop folks.

Then of course in August, there is the Desktop Summit. I'm one of the organizers and while collaboration isn't always perfect, the team has a common goal: organize a great event! Like the previous Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria I hope we can make some steps forward. This Desktop Summit will have collaboration even higher on its agenda than the last one and I hope this will have positive effects.

Doing more, moving forward

There certainly is more we can do to solve the conflicts. With apologies for the irony here, more blogs trying to analyze the whole thing may simply be fueling the flames more than extinguish them. Talking to people works better. I don't claim there was no talk, there was. However, much communication we do happens over the web. And as we are all aware, that can easily lead to misunderstandings. So the face to face meetings I suggest, as well as an awareness of biases like the fundamental attribution error, can contribute to solving these conflicts in a more effective manner. As long as the results get documented in a few (public!) places and as such don't get forgotten the results of such meetings can be good and long lasting!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

Personally, I'll stay away from the subject now - I've dented, tweeted and now blogged enough about it. I'll focus on the positive - including the Desktop Summit. And making sure the next openSUSE conference will have as much of a collaborative atmosphere as the last one!

criticism towards GNOME Shell

Reading all the controversy around the decision by the GNOME Shell designers to remove the minimize and maximize buttons from GNOME shell reminds me quite a bit of the discussions around Plasma. Especially for stuff like the brilliant yet controversial Folderview widget.

criticism

It also makes me wonder if those complaining have ever tried GNOME Shell... As is adequately explained in this rationale, minimizing simply has no place in the concepts behind GNOME Shell. Period. And if you've tried GNOME Shell you would realize that.

GNOME Shell in openSUSE 11.4

Yes, Shell takes getting used to, it does enforce certain habits. If you want to customize your environment for maximum 'getting-work-done' then maybe GNOME Shell is (currently) not for you. But that's the crowd KDE has always appeased to anyway. There is after all a trade-off between efficiency and ease of use (or rather, discoverability) - it is why most seasoned sysadmins use a command line.

Newbies!

But the power of GNOME Shell lies somewhere else. Put a newbie in front of it. Observe - in 5 minutes they've figured out how to use it, really. It is very simple and intuitive. I find that very impressive. Especially on a touch screen, it all makes a lot of sense. And it also works on very small screens. And yes, you'll see, the minimize button DOES NOT make sense in GNOME Shell. Really.

If you want to criticize GNOME Shell, talk about technology. I would've advocated to not build a new tech platform but build Shell on something like Plasma which is designed to make interfaces like GNOME Shell, or do like Ubuntu did with Unity 2D). But I kind'a get why they didn't, it's software 'from the other camp'. A more harmful thing is that they didn't get involved with the fd.o systray/notification rework done by KDE and Ubuntu, I see it as a big miss for GNOME Shell, and I'll consider it narrow-minded until I see or hear a good rationale somewhere ;-)

Plasma 4.6 and KDE Apps in openSUSE 11.4

But don't balk at the design until you've tried it with your grandmother... And in the end, Shell is innovative and new and will need maturing. I always have a soft spot for innovative and new things, it's why I like Plasma despite the issues it still has. So I do look forward to the final release of GNOME 3 and I'm happy that we (openSUSE/Novell) decided to press GNOME 3/Shell LiveDVDs as soon as the release of GNOME 3 is out. Yes, we'll also make KDE ones, 4.6 on openSUSE 11.4 really rocks and deserves it ;-)

marketing and talking points

Hi all!

Next week - conference :D
Looking forward to meeting many of you...

But I blog about something else - I've spend a significant proportion of Monday on making screenshots... I saw an email on the GNOME marketing list mentioning how impressed they were by a slideshow used by the KDE team at the Utah Open Source Conference. This turned my mind back to an earlier discussion about screenshots. KDE.org has nice screenshots on pages like this one, GNOME does not. So while creating screenshots for an openSUSE slideshow I made a few with the stock GNOME artwork and send them their way...

Questions and answers

Another thing I have worked on is our page with "Talking Points" for our ambassadors. The goal of these pages is to provide our ambassadors, who go to tradeshows and fairs to talk about openSUSE, with arguments and answers to questions. Of course I don't have the knowledge to answer all these questions, nor do I know what questions our ambassadors get asked.

Yesterday I have re-arranged all the questions that have been added over the last weeks into a few neath pages where they can be answered. I also worked on some answers - but I need your help! Go through it, see if you can (help) answer them, or of course if you know more good questions. The wiki page is here. Yes, some of these questions can be hard to answer but there are surely answers that are much simpler - so even if you think you don't know that much, go in, see if you can help our ambassadors out a bit!

hugs,
Jos

strategy, helping SUSE...

Hi all!

I just published/send/submitted the last part of the openSUSE strategy stuff. Coming from KDE, this was a very interesting endeavor. It's not done yet, of course - I expect a huge amount of comments on this one (find it here) as it includes some notes on our 'competition' (coopetition?), what the results will be and how we'd like to be in a few years.

I know the KDE community is also looking at future directions - KDE 4 series is stabilizing, so where to go next? GNOME meanwhile is getting GNOME 3 out - but at the same time also had strategic discussions at the last GUADEMY. And of course Fedora has followed openSUSE in discussing directions. Guess it's contagious...

Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with 'strategic discussions' within Free Software communities. In an earlier blog I spoke about the why of a strategy, so I won't go there again. I do feel, however, that tides seem to have turned. Either those sick of strategy have gone away, or those who think it's good to think about the future have convinced them. Or changed their ways of course, hehe...

Anyway. For a sec, let me move to the topic of helping... Not just openSUSE, but Free Software in general. I'm not sure how effective this is going to be, but I like the idea even though it's remarkably similar to linux counter :D

Ok, one more thing, because I can't help myself: the openSUSE marketing team is working on some flyers - KDE promo peeps might recognize something there, hehe. Find them here (for potential users) and here (for potential developers). Feel free to edit and improve ;-)

Oh and of course, because we're less than 2 weeks away now - go register!



Love, Jos

Banshee & GNOME

Since a couple of days I'm using the Banshee music player. Last sunday I installed openSUSE with GNOME on my desktop system to play around with it. Banshee surely stuck - I installed it on my laptop with Plasma desktop as well. It's a very nice player with only one weird thing: it really really likes Opeth. Often I set it to play some electronic music at random, then it suddenly starts moves to metal - Opeth usually. Not that I greatly dislike that, I just have no idea why it does it ;-)

Suusie GNOME being nice

Otherwise, openSUSE is treating me reasonably well. The NVIDIA drivers on my desktop are less of a hassle than Intel was on my laptop - they do make the screen fuzzy sometimes, and Compiz really works horrible so I had to disable desktop effects in GNOME. KWin works almost fine somehow... Just a tad slow. GNOME Shell does desktop effects best: completely sharp screen, good performance. It does seem to restart itself sometimes but only the screen goes to showing only the wallpaper for a few seconds.

(I know newer NVIDIA/Xorg/Kernel should solve these issues, btw, I'll just install newer versions once I feel they're stable enough)



Tracker is great - incredibly fast and very little effect on system resources as far as I could tell. Sorry for Nepomuk but when it comes to actually finding files - no dice, it just crashes a lot. Both fill my .xsession-errors up like crazy, however. Vuntz has asked for the tracker errors already :D

In general, GNOME is fast and lean. Only Banshee sometimes manages to sometimes use 161% cpu on my desktop - rather impressive. Luckily I have a nice quadcore :D

Evo less so

Evolution was quite painful, I stopped using it. With the treeview (flat lists don't work with more than 10 mails/day) it is almost impossible to see the individual messages - the 'tree' itself is completely hidden, only showing small triangles leaving you guessing what thread a message belongs to. I added this to the GNOME Pet Peeves Project page, hope someone can fix it... Of course, maybe I just couldn't find the configuration option, lemme know if that's the case and I'll say sorry :D

good

bad

The keyboard shortcuts don't work for me either - I am used to using the left and right arrow keys to go through the list of messages and the up and down to scroll through the message itself. And keys like A, R and L to reply to all, sender or a list. Not figured out how to configure that and for efficient use of my time, this is crucial. Same with Liferea, btw.

I found out that Xchat didn't do what I needed from IRC (like putting names behind the nicks in the list and hiding part/join messages), neither did Empathy, but Pidgin is much more convenient. And to be honest, it looks better than any messaging app I've used before. I don't use chat (other than IRC) very often so I haven't installed in on my laptop yet, but I might.

Cheese rocks, period. I can however only say that from previous experience - not current, as neither my desktop webcam nor my laptop webcam work :(

Integration

Thanks to the Oxygen-molecule theme GTK applications fit in KDE very well. The only exception is the system tray - they don't understand that it is transparent so they show ugly squares behind the icons. But the work on sharing a notification spec makes sure they use the normal notifications in Plasma, nice touch! Within GNOME the KDE apps adjust their theme automatically with the exception for icons - not sure if that's intended or a bug.


Bansee in Plasma Desktop (I must admit I had to adjust colors a bit to make it fit really well - somehow the Oxygen Molecule theme has its colors slightly-off)

GNOME desktops

GNOME offers two desktops - the 'old' one and GNOME Shell. What I like about the default desktop is how easy it is to add applets to the panel - I always want a load applet there to see what is going on. Otherwise it works ok-ish but it ain't very special - unlike GNOME Shell.

GNOME Shell is quite unfinished as it is undergoing heavy development. It seems to ignore about 4 out of 5 clicks of my mouse making it a bit cumbersome to use. Yet I already prefer it over the normal desktop - if only just because I love seeing something new and exciting. It provides a very intuitive way of working with one or more desktops and windows. Most of that intuitivity is in small details - like the ripple effect you see when you bump your mousecursor to the top-right corner of the screen. They still have to improve the menu's but app search already works awesome. While it doesn't work here I know you can just drag an app to one of your virtual destkops to start it there - awesome! So despite the current issues I would definately say GNOME Shell the right direction for GNOME development.

This turned out a bit too long

I initially wanted to write about Banshee alone, cuz I like it - but now this is about pretty much all of my GNOME experience in a few days :D

I might blog more about it, but first I'm working on some OBS and SUSE Studio things - they're both pretty awesome. Oh and did you know you can win 10K with a good SUSE Studio appliance?

clutter/Qt/Arthur etc

Dear lazyweb,

I've been looking a while for some info about Clutter which just released version 1.0 and how it fits in the big scheme of things. Yes, I've read their website, but it doesn't help ME much... I've heard comparisons of Clutter and Qt's Arthur but googeling Clutter and Arthur isn't gonna help me either ;-)

I know you could use Clutter in KDE apps, and I've seen that KMPlayer does that. So what are the advantages to that?

I did find this reasonably extensive comparison between Qt and GTK: http://techfreaks4u.com/blog/?p=1021

It is informative but doesn't tell me that much about Clutter, besides it is probably outdated already considering the usual speed of development...

Anyone who can provide me with a (preferably unbiased) writeup?

Las Palmas!

So, I've arrived at the hotel. Most of the journey went smooth. Aside from my brand new laptop suddenly scaring me with weird harddrive-related errors and a busdriver letting me wait for another bus for nothing, it was fine.

So how is it here? A bit windy, which is good considering the temperature. It's a nice island. Not very green - actually it can look surprisingly 'desert' in some area's. Very nice people, lots of ocean. And I have wifi in the hotel so what more can I ask for?

Just two days and Akademy will start. Several ppl are supposed to be here already, I'll meet a few of them for dinner tonight. Looking forward to it, didn't have time to catch up much at Linuxtag in Berlin last week.