was the first community-made flavor that I started and it's got the strongest community within Ubuntu in my humble opinion. And it's a great community to be part of because you have good fun for six months developing this project and then you get flown out to exciting

places like Orlando here and you get fancy hotels and you get the sun and you get to swim around. And of course we spend the week working really really hard on the next version of Ubuntu and writing specs and we're in long tough sessions all day long and it's a lot of hard work but we find it rewarding because the results and because of the good

friends that we make we find it an excellent project to be part of. This is in Orlando in Florida which is a bit of a crazy city because most of our cities we spend all day working these rooms and then going into the center of town but in Orlando there is no center

of town to go into for food in the evening. There is only downtown Disney to go into in the evening or Universal Studios world so you end up going to having Mickey Mouse burgers or Bubba Gump shrimp co in the evening which is a very surreal place but that's all part of the fun of working in Ubuntu is going around the world seeing different cultures including

mass American culture and being able to enjoy and experience that. And because I often worked I work from home Canonical sponsored me to work on Ubuntu. I didn't actually need an office

I didn't have any immediate colleagues didn't feel lonely at home because you get to talk to everybody on the internet that's all good. But people often said why don't you go off and work on a Caribbean island somewhere so instead of going home from Orlando I went to Guadalupe here which does anybody know where the edge of Europe is? Does anybody have a euro note?

Anybody got five euro notes on them? Simon where's my wallet that you had? Well anyone? Here pass this one. So if you look on the back of a euro note there's what you normally

think of as Europe but also down in the corner here there's random little bits which are also Europe and turn out they're physically actually on the other side of the world in the Caribbean or in South America but they're random parts of France which are part of the European Union and on the other side of the world. You don't need a password

to get into these places to use the euro they have European healthcare they have all the same laws as the rest of the European Union you don't need a visa to work there or anything

so I thought why don't I just go there so I did just go there and it was great fun you could sit on the beach all day and drink tea punch and c'est la France mais c'est la pas la France it is has a different attitude to life people are a bit slower a bit a bit more relaxed a bit more paced a bit happier a bit a bit more fun and there's a there's

a rainforest I could walk out up the road from my house and explore the rainforest which is incredible if you've ever been in one as the Sun sets in the night the the frogs start squeaking and there's millions of frogs all around you it's the loudest noise that you've

you've ever heard just frogs squeaking away is quite incredible this is Goya which is the time that I I lived in a live near the hills up here but it's got a it's got a nice harbor here and I always go canoeing whenever I go in the world I enjoy I enjoy canoeing so you can hire a canoe from here from the canoe club there and you've got perfect flat calm seas that

you can just paddle around anything here and that's because a couple hundred meters offshore there's a rocky reef if you're standing there come come over this side there's other seats over here you can you can just come in the other side so there's a rocky reef so so all the surf coming off the Pacific crashes onto that so if you're a surfer and I certainly

am and I went surfing there every day then got perfect surf every day but if you just want either beginner stuff or you want plain exercise stuff you can paddle around in the flat water it's it's beautiful for anybody who loves that stuff there's a there's a road that goes around the island here like most of these islands it's got a single road that goes around the

island there's a dual carriageway road that cars belt around and and roads come straight on here and I would come up here so when I went on here one day a car hit into the back of my car at about 150 kilometers an hour and and flipped my car over my head would have been jolted forward in a sudden rush and I would have banged the head against the steering wheel

and the the brain inside my head it's like everybody's brain of course it it's surrounded by a cycle fluid that would have been pushed forward into my skull and and that would have create a large amount of bruising inside inside of my brain and then the clock would have started

ticking the clock starts ticking because as soon as an instant like that happens you have to get to hospital as soon as you can you have to get medical attention as soon as you can otherwise the longer that's delayed then the more chance there are of not recovering having permanent brain damage of having permanent spine injury might have been another issue so that

the ambulance would have raced out to me as soon as possible I believe there was a helicopter that came to me I was obviously unconscious at the time nobody nobody knows if it was but I read in the newspaper that a helicopter came out and rescued me shame I would have enjoyed watching the flight the paramedics would have would have taken me from the car being very careful not to be moving my spine in case of spinal injuries

they would have tried to they would have measured me on the Glasgow Coma scale they would have shut off the road of course make make the accident seem safe as the first thing they would have done shutting off the road would have been a major incident on this island that's why I was in all the newspapers they would have flown me into hospital they would have

well I don't know what they would have done because I was in a coma and and I don't have any notes from it I saw so what they often do in these cases is they put a probe into your head to make sure that the fluid doesn't build up to create higher pressure

so most brain damage gets caused by higher pressure in the brain and so most of the problems after a severe head trauma like this is fluid building up creating higher pressure I don't know if they did that or not I was unconscious at the time I don't think I have

any scars so I don't think they did that to me but they would have still monitored whether or not my my brain was still active or functioning there would be massive bruising of course internally into the into the brain and there would have been a lot of neurons disconnected millions of neurons disconnected in an instant and then which would have caused me to go into coma

and and and lie around in bed doing not very much so the comas get measured on what's called the Glasgow Coma scan if you've ever been to it's quite it's quite apt that they have their own coma scale for for measuring what happens on a Saturday night and and it's not a in-out thing a coma it it is on a scale of are you actually

conscious or are you unconscious and do your eyes open my eyes wouldn't have opened do I am I talking about anything do I make any sounds and I would have made any sounds do I respond to movement so I think if you're all the way down here then your chances are you're going to be dead so I I would have been around about three on on the

movement stuff if they if they poked my arms or they try my reflexes then things would have moved and then over the next two days I would have slowly woken up and I spend the next the next day unconscious then the second day I would have been drifting a bit in and out of consciousness and I had a gradual realization of going oh where something's going

on here and falling back into the coma I vaguely remember the nurse trying to speak to me um but since I vaguely remember it being in perfect French when I spoke to her that can't be true because I don't speak perfect French unfortunately um I vaguely remember my

flatmate come along to sell me or you you know that accident this is quite bad and then collapsing I vaguely remember them them sending me home after two days because I could begin to walk and then I collapsed so they let me stay for one more day and then oh on the third day they did send me home they sent me home in a taxi

yeah not not unfortunately uh canonical one they sent me home in a taxi with all my notes so I don't know what happened in the hospital because I was woozy at the time I left my notes in the taxi um so I have no idea what happened and I hadn't I didn't know what to do next I was managed to get home lie in my own bed didn't have energy to get out and do very much

unfortunately canonical one another fine reason to work on on Ubuntu as a project um getting getting the occasional private jet flights anywhere you want it didn't come out and rescue me Mark had other things with it so I had to get on a public airplane get myself home

which is pretty difficult to do when you're only just about conscious and can only just operate a computer uh had to go to the polis to to get the all clears to be able to leave the island because they they didn't know whose fault it was it was my fault was it his fault

was like drinking at the time I had alcohol in the car maybe I was bruising or something but eventually I convinced them that it wasn't my fault or at least not enough that anybody would care and uh and that I wasn't bruising at the time I had to go to the car hire a company and kind of apologize to them and get my stuff out of the car and uh and managed to get a public flight home um back in Scotland they the hospital there gave me an MRI scan which is

is has anybody ever had an MRI scan these these machines are incredible any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and these machines are are pretty much magic I mean they're giant machines with giant magnets and the giant magnets they resonate

at the exact resonant frequency of hydrogen molecules and water and they can use that to build up a 3d image of inside your head which is it's incredible um slightly daunting experience when going into one I wouldn't want to do it as a as a young child being ill that'd be horrible but uh I found it really fun and interesting uh this isn't my MRI

scan this is the MRI scan of another guy who gave a talk called what's going on in his head and he's got a couple of bits there where uh the the blood isn't flowing in the in the head so he's actually got brain damage that will never be fixed um they said that I didn't have any any bits like that so I still have a fully functioning brain with with just

disconnected neurons and bits that are bruised so the full recovery may or may not be possible but nobody knows doctors so that's what was known about the brain that nobody knows if when an incident like that happens if they'll recover if they'll not recover and nobody knows how

fast they might recover nobody knows if they might recover over one year over 10 years um and even the terminology used for brain injuries there is no consistent terminology so concussion head trauma brain injury acquired brain injury for abi um there's a couple of other different

ways to reverse it um mild brain injuries depending on who you talk to it could be in severe head trauma because I was in a coma for a day or it might be a mild brain injury because I can still stand up and function and work but um but it so it's not severe brain injury but the terminology is completely um it's completely fluid because nobody understands what

goes on in the brain and there is no way of saying there's no dividing line between are you just a bit concussed or are you actually brain damaged all those terminologies they actually just mean all the same thing so I went home and I lay on my back and I

recovered um over over Christmas and Hogman day and I watched box sets I watched box sets of house and a few other things the only time in my life whenever ever spent time watching box sets because usually I have better things to do but the only thing I the only energy I had to do was watch television um and I watched a lot of house because it's good good tele program I also I

started acting a lot like the character house because he is a grumpy bastard who who doesn't doesn't feel the need to say please and thank you and excuse me and I didn't have the energy to say please and thank you and excuse me when you when you're recovering from a severe trauma like I had um your your instincts um take over and your your your rational um

rational mind anything that that takes time and thoughts and a bit of energy that just goes out the window so so I ended up being a bit of a grumpy bastard and not not being very nice to people but fortunately I have good friends and family who who were able to look after me uh I also gained an interest in psychology because at the time of course

I was lying there thinking and the only thing I could think of was was happening to my own brain was humming to my own psychology and as as geeks we're often typically quite bad at understanding people's and our own behavior and our own emotions and our own needs but as those emotions and needs slowly came back to me I was able to understand actually

why did I act like that why why did I say yes and no um what is the separation between the rational mind and the the instinctive mind and typically the instinctive mind works a lot faster because it's a lot more it's a lot more primitive in terms of evolution than the rational

mind so noticing when it was at the instinctive mind just made me do something then the rational mind made me agree to it or the rational mind made me go no actually I don't want to do that I want to I want to do something else instead um so I know I know a guy who's a wheelchair user he's paralyzed from the waist down and he says that being disabled is the best way to learn how to understand how the body works oh that muscle does fit into that thing so that's

that's why I do need that muscle in order to do this action he's had a pretty horrible way to understand how the body works being being disabled from the waist down um and it's a pretty horrible way to learn how the brain works but it's a pretty successful way to learn how the brain works having it completely broken and reset and it's a lot like windows 95 is a

running windows 95 and then boots back up slowly and into a safe mode um so you can't you you start off with no rational thinking abilities and and those eventually come back as the the safe mode

turns into whatever normal windows 95 mode is um I drank an awful lot of iron brew if anybody's been to Scotland we drink an awful lot of iron brew in general in Scotland I drank two liters of that stuff in the morning uh just because of the instinctive need of our brew and and because it's got a lot of sugar in it as well so my body would have my body would have been

using a lot a lot more energy so a brain typically uses 30 watts and it's kind of at rest and during that recovery phase it probably would have doubled to about 60 watts in terms of energy so hence the craving for sugar which is possibly not the best best immediate health way to recover but um but sometimes you've got to do what what what your body craves and needs

so then I went back to work and I work on Kubuntu and I'm really smug that I did manage to go back to work because people get severe head trauma 90 percent of them don't go back to work after two years and I was back at work after two weeks so I'm pretty smug about that um working um we have an awesome community in Kubuntu

we've got about 50 registered community members and goodness knows how many other people hang around on help out on forums and other methods um so they were still uh working on it and and uh building up the distro while I'd been most active action and they they

continued to be working on it while I was getting back into action um we we release our 613 releases we we package parts of KDE uh we occasionally go oh wouldn't it be great if we have a tablet version or a or a mobile phone version or something like that all these plans

um which which we hoped would be supported by canonical maybe canonical would would realize that Kubuntu is the way to go as a favorite distro to support and because we've got that wonderful convergence between mobile phone stuff in KDE and and tablet stuff and desktop stuff and even server stuff in all throughout KDE so we we have been planning and we're releasing

these as they get developed by our wonderful upstreams like KDE um canonical also supports some other interesting projects like launchpad and bazaar any users of launchpad and bazaar here really one one two good but uh then they dropped them unfortunately or put them into

maintenance mode so they took all the developers off both these projects which is a shame but enough there's like two people who use it bizarre um and uh and while this was one of mark's original plans for canonical would be to to take over the world by distributed revision

control but honestly original usable distribute distributed revision control system um for whatever reason it hasn't had much take up in the world and it came along and it was much faster uh which is a shame because I worked in bazaar for six months and I found it a really nice system to to use and to develop on um and launchpad as a code hosting site is it's still in my opinion

one of the best places to to host your code much better than sourceforge or or google code does that still exist um but again very little used so so canonical dropped that and canonical also made my post for at kubuntu resundant so they they said they wouldn't sponsor me working on kubuntu anymore at the time canonical was going through a lot of restructuring and

they had obviously decided that they needed to make some money which is not unreasonable I guess so they they moved the developers around from from these projects and moved kubuntu and told me that I couldn't work on kubuntu anymore um which was a crying shame which which I had worked on for last previous five or six years or so and uh and and when

mixed in with all these other ailments that I got as a result of the head trauma um I felt pretty damn about it so head trauma it's an hidden disability nobody nobody to see you um would know that you're disabled and I had a stretched ligament in the back of my

eye so I I had to wear an eye patch quite a lot in order to stop the double vision uh which has mostly healed over time um and so this is the only giveaway that I would have had had head trauma but because it's mostly healed I don't wear the eye patch much anymore but I still had at the time and still do to some extent get all these crazy weird um um problems in

my head and it's completely random as far as anybody is concerned when and and how much and where it happens uh feeling woozy feeling buzzy um can't can't necessarily move my muscles very much because if the body decides I've got to put more energy into fixing the head and it takes

away energy from being able to move any muscles um yeah having not emotions any kind of mental depression in in any kind of illness mental um health is is well related to your physical health uh to some extent but when the brain injury of course it is exactly the same so so people who have severe head trauma often get anxiety and depression and all that kind

of stuff and I'm pretty smug but I didn't um to any biggest end but I have felt fragile enough at times uh time speeds up so one of the weird ones because your brain slows down when you're it's trying to recover then then the rest of all it seems to speed up so days and weeks pass by um and a lot of memory lapses once that person's name where did I put my keys

the same kind of stuff that everybody else gets but you get them a lot more it's a lot harder to think your way through them as you where did I put my keys spend hours just searching for keys or something else today I should know where it is which would happen in in normal everyday life just happens an awful lot more an awful lot harder to work it out when it does when

you've got a brain injury so mix all that in with with being told that I couldn't work on Kubuntu anymore is kind of a bit down um and the Kubuntu community here this is everyone who's registered as a Kubuntu member um did some soul searching going well is there any need for

this this flavor of ubuntu anymore there are plenty of other kd distributions out there um and we're only a sub-brand of the main ubuntu brand so in terms of mind share people who don't particularly aren't enthusiastic don't care about free sauce and open source um they'll just go to ubuntu because that's the main brand so uh is there a need for this

is there is there any purpose in it should we should we just give up and say fair enough and move on thanks for all the hot tub parties uh then I got a phone call then I got a phone call from a guy called nile guy called now he was a businessman who worked I can't remember any idea what he used to work in paul he worked in something where he was he was worried that

he was getting a black hat and was selling stuff for no no useful server and he realized that there are all these awesome free software projects out there with business models just waiting to happen just needed somebody to make those business models fit in with the free software developers and people in the business world they still use phones um I can't remember

the last time I made an actual phone call talking to somebody for for half an hour about something um but this guy is really good at making phone calls he's not good at email and certainly doesn't do irc but he's very very good at phoning you every single day to say can we can we do a deal here is there some possibility for you guys to talk to you guys

to to be able to make some income so he he phoned me and said do you want a commercial support service and he found another company in england do you want to provide a commercial support service for kubuntu and at the time I had people emailing me to say oh I hear kubuntu's and its support is being dropped by canonical um can I depend upon this stuff I need this stuff

I've just done a role I sent my school and all these people are I've told them they can get commercial support where can I get it um so he successfully tried to put together a deal for commercial support unfortunately then blocks by canonical who owned the trademark to it and and prevented it from happening for an awful long time which was a shame but gave me hope

that hang on if this person's putting in so much energy then maybe there is a need for this if I've got people telling me there's a need for him to put in that much energy then maybe I should put in more energy as well when I get it then I got an email from a guy called Clemens saying I'm starting up a company called blue systems I would like to sponsor your work

on kubuntu and I was off I was pretty skeptical about this because it seems quite rare that somebody just wants to hire you back for the same job that you've just been made redundant from and I was pretty pretty reluctant to do it because I was still recovering health wise

it was a good time to change employer from chronicle with this this could all go horribly wrong whatever it was but what was he offering could go horribly wrong but he kept emailing me and said yeah I'm here and I just say the word and I'll support kubuntu in whatever way you want so eventually I had to go out and meet this guy does he really exist I went out to

Germany to see bit to the massive conference I should see bit and he does really exist and he did want to help kubuntu and turns out that he owns the biggest meat factory in France if you're a vegetarian then then kubuntu might not be the distribution for you but but he he sold

off his shares in the meat factory and wanted new things to to invest in and see if they worked and one of the things is is kubuntu so yay that was great so I thought well that's great we decided to continue it the community decided that there was a need for us there were enough

people saying we want kd flavor in ubuntu this is the perfect combination of awesome software desktop software and awesome distribution we use it we need it these people provided sponsorship they provided the commercial support eventually once chronicle got through their their trademark

stuff and so we were happy again so we went to kd conference and I still looking a bit ill and a bit ropey and still need the eyepatch but but happy and decided that we would continue doing this stuff so there's there's our friendly kubuntu people at at the kd conference in the in

where's that that was talon was it in estonia and and we managed to get some useful stuff done there and and talk to our upstreams it's very important there's a distribution that we I've always aligned kubuntu to the kd upstream project as much as as much as I can I want kubuntu to be a distribution that shows kd software at its best because I think one of

the reasons why I use kd software is it's not just because the first I haven't come across or because the community is so awesome and cute and good looking but because because the software is so high quality the the framework that creates the software cute and the kd libraries they are the best and easiest to use and so working with kd upstream by just shipping kd

upstream and making sure any patches go upstream making sure that we don't put too many changes in the distribution and any changes we put in the distribution must also go upstream first means that we get the best experience for our users and then we had another uds in

denmark this time another crazy hotel massive big hotel in copenhagen and and because the extra sponsorship from blue systems we we could sponsor our own people to come out there so clinical so sponsored half these people to come

out there and blue systems sponsored the other half and we could get smart shards and we could look like the real presence within the ubuntu community we weren't just hiding in the corner we were out there promoting ourselves as the main community part of ubuntu uh so we made another release console release um and life was good life was good

and then a couple of announcements from chronicle sort of made that made that not quite so good so ubuntu developers somewhere which as i said was one of the highlights of work in ubuntu they uh you get shipped out to sydney here and you get to uh meet different college areas see different parts of the world and and work on ubuntu with your favorite people

and in this case it was all in one room so back then we could all fit in one room and then it ended up in all fitting just about in one hotel an incredible big big event that was happening um they got cancelled so chronicle said well we're not going to fund this anymore um they found some rubbish excuses about increasing inclusion

why they should turn into an online only event which seemed an awful lot like finding excuses to fit the lack of a budget for running these things um and that that made us go oh jeez how are we going to run a community part of our software without a community meeting chronicle still could still afford to have their own people go to their own meetings

um but the the community that made most of ubuntu wasn't able to meet in in person anymore which is a big shame and took away an awful lot of what made ubuntu and then ubuntu the distribution which started out um as as promoting gnome and and community-made

software and having naked people on the cover and being an awful uh being very friendly to enthusiastic crowds like the ones here um they ended up redeveloping developing their own desktop so dropping uh community-made software from a lot of what ubuntu does they make unity which is

their own desktop to replace the gnome stuff um and and now they're making mirror and so they announced that they're going to replace x with mirror which is insane which is crazy um so they they're moving away from any community-made software which is just such a such a shame

because it destroys an awful lot of what made ubuntu ubuntu made it fun to work on uh was that it was community-made um and and so now that they're planning to move to their own display server well we thought can ubuntu continue again uh we can't meet in person anymore and we don't even have a display server to to work on we won't get support from anybody else

within the ubuntu community uh when they replace it with mirror um and also at the time my my head trauma which kind of recovers in this depth logarithmic graph you get periods of no recovery and then suddenly you notice that actually you can stay up until midnight without

a big problem and and um things are an awful lot better than they were a few weeks ago um so i kind of plateaued at the time and i was thinking oh jinx we've got all this all this problem of uh of of uh canonical moving away from the community and then me being a big part of the community that suddenly they're really moving away from um but then the community

rallied around we we uh blue systems had this meeting so there's a bunch of people that they sponsor now working on kde and uh and so we had hired a villain in spain by barcelona and and

worked from a villa from a week and this was taking us back to uh the roots of what i really enjoyed about ubuntu when it first started which was that we could all fit in the same room we all knew who each other were um we could we could work on on a similar kind of project working towards a common goal in this case the goal was porting kde to cute five kd frameworks

five so we've got uh kd libs which is uh quite big monolithic libraries that add on to the cute library for making uh gooey applications and kd frameworks five which modularizes that so it splits it all into 55 different bits and so if you develop cute you can just take whichever bits you want and that doesn't add a big huge dependency to your application

talk about that in the desktop room five o'clock today something like that it's going to be great you should go totally enjoyed working in there and then we had another academy and and these continue to be incredible i mean does this happen in in the real world if you work from microsoft does this happen maybe it does but but surely not as often that

you get to have rooftop drinks in front of the the guggenheim museum in bilbao this is gorgeous um and uh and that we could could sing and dance on the on the party at the at the stadium and in again in bilbao the party afterwards so we had a because the sponsorship from blue system we we

had a number of extra people there from kubuntu so we were able to have a whole day dedicated to kubuntu and planning our next our next releases or or our next expensive work or so so the the uds is that previously had been um required for that um we're able to do now on a small scale which is okay because we can we can all fit in the same room we all know what we're working towards that we can have a single day dedicated towards um planning the next months

of work and it turns out that it works actually quite a bit better than uds because um because it's all part of talking to upstream at the same time and because we all know each other and we'll fit in the same room um and we're not just a part of a conference which

mostly now focuses on whatever canonical ones the the the server or the cloud or um or their own proprietary tablet unity mere software and then these guys from from munich

they have one of the world's biggest learning desktop rollouts munich city council they put kubuntu and all their computers there and they've got a graph in their office of how many computers they put uh kubuntu on and their target is 12 000 in their graph goes like that and then it continues up because the the rest of the city council said this is so great we should put it on all our computers here um so they uh the limux company who do that in

munich they are again offered us a weekend sprint in their offices uh so we all get together to again plan our work and and do things face to face and work out what we're going to do and so we're all still surprisingly what i didn't expect when when kernel initially dropped uh much of their support for kubuntu we're still a functioning

community we still all like each other we still work together we still have enough energy to be able to do stuff um and we can still do that within ubuntu so do you need to be brain damaged to care about desktop linux is the question i do care about desktop linux i still care about desktop linux but sadly not the world doesn't care in the way that i had hoped the world

would care when i first started this in about the year 2000 or so at that time we went to linux conferences and um and i remember going to an ibm stand and the ibm guy was going ah linux was taking off on the server now so we're getting questions about when will it take off from desktop when it will replace windows uh and of course that never happened which is

a shame and it's never going to happen for reasons that nobody's quite managed to pin down why is why is kitty and gnome failed to take off but one of them might be the fractious nature of it we've got kitty here and gnome they're both trying to achieve the same thing and then there are half a dozen other major desktops um that that have come along all trying

to do much the same thing so that fractious nature might be part of it the the lack of qa might be part of it one of the interesting things that canonical now does is is automated qa which um it probably happens out in normal software companies but that i haven't seen it happen in free software world so much um and chronicles but in a lot of work to get automated

qa so every every day the ubuntu build gets automatically tested by by machines um and and that helps them an awful lot and unfortunately we have some of that in kd but not as much as as would be nice um why else has it not taken off um well we there's no integration with the

hardware manufacturers so again canonical tried that an awful lot getting people to integrate with the hardware manufacturers and a number of other companies have tried that and and not quite succeeded for for reasons that nobody quite knows and then google came along and have done it with with android and with chrome as well so you can now go to pc world big big shops and and just buy linux on the desktop there but it's it's not it's not the

linux that we all expected it to be a decade ago which is a crying shame um but for whatever reason um it seems that community-made software can't quite work with um the hardware manufacturers in the way that the hardware manufacturer would like probably they don't pick up the phone enough so probably it needs somebody like nile who picks up the phone and calls them every single day

say hey we we've got this great product you want to work with us um but we're not very good at doing that so for whatever reason that hasn't taken off um and in kubuntu we still have the problems of of mir which has been put off for the last two ubuntu releases um but may well happen the next release um and and when they change display server in ubuntu will

kubuntu be able to maintain either x or will we go to wayland um but then do we have the knowledge and the the time and the energy within the kubuntu team to be able to maintain that it's still completely unknown so it might all still fall apart in the next year

we do have an exciting year for kubuntu we've got the long-term support release in in april so we'll work on that now trying to remove as many bugs as we can trying not to add any features even though it is tempting um in order to make it good enough for long-term support but then after that we've got do we switch to wayland quite possibly we do do we switch to kd frameworks 5 do we switch to qt 5 quite possibly we do and we will um

but that will that will probably need a lot of a lot of work to make sure that it works correctly with with the uh with the current generation kd software and that it will work on wayland and what happens if you have if you have ubuntu running unity on mir and and

how do you pick which display server all of these are completely unknown and uh and well it's gonna be an awful lot of fun to to find out how it'll happen so do come and join us we're we're an open community that anybody can join that's the end of my slides are there any

questions um hang on for the microphone if you have a question folks please raise your hand all right um thank you for your talk that's great um how close is your relationship with

the debbie and kde teams and given all the stuff that canonical has let us down over the years do you have any thoughts about perhaps you know supporting a more community-driven distribution um how close is our relationship to debbie and kde

pretty close we hang out on the channels and we talk to them and and and they're good friends i hope um we obviously take it a lot more from debbie than than we then goes the other way in ubuntu in general because we sync all our packages from debion um when when we add

any patches or change anything to the package uh in kubuntu we have a policy of sending upstream that isn't the case for the rest of ubuntu but certainly in ubuntu we have a policy of sending it to kde but if it's relevant to send it to debion then we have a policy of sending it to debion how much we succeed in following that policy we think we're pretty good but we're not perfect there'll be plenty of times when we don't send that upstream um in terms of

working on joint packaging well with different distributions so we we can't and don't work on on this same packaging at the same time because we have different time scales but when we have new packages um i always say to deb in there are packages here please take them so so that we can um you don't duplicate the work and kd frameworks 5 has just had a tech preview and

i just spent a few weeks uh packaging that's all and and i deliberately set out to the start to say deb in you should you should take these packages um because otherwise there'll be a massive duplication of work and that's just silly um so hopefully they will take those packages and fix all the mistakes that i've got in them and then we'll we'll be helping each other which

is always my aim any other questions if you did decide to change the base distro that you work from is the community cohesive enough to take them with you and in particular the user base

places like munich could you take them to a different distro or even a different operating system because presumably they care about kde and the desktop rather than what goes on underneath so should we change the distro or would it work if we change the base distro maybe but probably not when we when we were having these problems when kernel call first

dropped a lot of their support from kubuntu we did think well firstly should we keep the name because this trademark we're trying to set up this commercial support deal and that got delayed for um six months to a year just because they they didn't have the time or nj they didn't care about us we're just a small part of what they do um to give a simple trademark agreement

saying yeah you can do this uh so we looked at changing the name um and we we brainstormed and we came up with a good name and and then mark sherwood said no we'll kick you out of the project if you do that um so we had to stay with the name um and then we'd say well should we just go to a different distro and there's a bunch of other debin type therapists who do much the same

stuff should we go to them um but a lot of what is important about what works quite well about kubuntu is that it it is um part of ubuntu and and it does have a big a big following a big community besides and around kubuntu and it has a lot of the the infrastructure like launch

next we're going to change our name and we're going to be another debin derivative i suspect we couldn't we couldn't maintain a lot of the people wouldn't follow us because they just go well maybe fedora or susa would be equally good options so we decided against that and

we're still quite happy within ubuntu even though there are occasional disagreements other questions another question down here see earlier today i asked if people would be considerate and just you know stage their questions in order of the room but no could you raise your hand again is it you all right yeah watching backpedal thanks thank you uh so you seem to have weathered

the challenges that have been thrown your way pretty well compared to a lot of the other teams within ubuntu i'm thinking of the other flavors and perhaps the moto team as well do you have any advice you can give these teams the things they can do those lessons they

learn from kubuntu and how they can reinvigorate themselves maybe so as i say in my humble opinion we're the most most successful and active community team within ubuntu i could be entirely wrong it could just not be hanging right in the right rrc channels or like mailing lists but in order to in order to increase that well it's important to that you have a community

council for example you have quite frequent meetings it's important that when somebody comes into the channel to say hey i'm interested how can i help out that there is somebody there who can respond in time and there's a list of things that they can do so you can say hey let's just look at this list are you interested in this kind of thing or this kind of thing i

can i can give you a tutorial on how to do this kind of thing so that's really important it's important to make sure that people are on planet ubuntu and that people are blogging so that it's visible it's important to have face-to-face meetings again getting rid of the uds is i think that will have been quite demotivating for a lot of people who

were previously motivated in the the community contributors to to ubuntu packaging and yeah there might be interesting ways to to work out how to sponsor that kind of meeting but i think i think it needs a lot of um it needs somebody there as well who can do it

almost full-time and somebody who doesn't go away on holidays so a lot of the community managers in ubuntu that are employed by canonical they go away for christmas holidays which is when a lot of community contributors want to come in because they're holiday and they can do stuff um and i it's not a nine-to-five job being a community manager it's a 24-hour job the

internet doesn't sleep and i think so it needs somebody around all the time who's able to hand hold that kind of thing does that answer the question hopefully i remember a few years ago near the beginning of the ubuntu project mark shuttleworth came on stage and i'm sure i remember

he very sort of ostentatiously took his jacket to show he was wearing a kde t-shirt to proclaim that he supported kd as an equal player within the community and he was generally wanted to be seen as a supporter of the community i i love debbie and i just want to help it was was his spiel early on and that seems to have evolved into something quite

different and if you look at his recent blog postings there tends to be quite a lot of almost techie vituperation when it comes to engaging with the community what's changed has he become disillusioned such that the whole of ubuntu is now a disillusioned project should you be worried beyond just mere as was said earlier and think about unhoisting yourself from what

looks like it might he might lose interest in frankly um interesting question i don't think he's really not going to stop ubuntu being a community project at any time but will ubuntu still be a friendly place for community to be able to contribute is is slightly it's still a

bit unknown because when mir comes in might that destroy an awful lot of community-made software so when when ubuntu first started there wasn't a definite business plan for canonical there wasn't a definite way of this is how we're going to make money this is this is where the value is going to be added and so forth um so so he did do an awful lot of of um being nice to

gnome being nice to kd being nice to other upstreams um and then it didn't take off it didn't it it there weren't oem manufacturers who shipped with ubuntu on it dow did a little bit occasionally but then whether that kind of fell away um and then android came along and now

everybody runs linux on their mobile phone on on android with with open source but not really community-made software um so my suspicion is that he's seen that happen and that he's seen kernel call and other companies not work out in the community-made software world and has been moving towards um in-house made software um and one interesting thing that they've done

that that free software community-made software is not very good at is hire a design team so there's a instead of it being a developer going well i really want to web browser now i'm to code in a web browser you've got people up in a in a tower and designing what what the software

should be and then handing out their designs to programmers to code on um and that will tend to produce more shiny more slick more friendly software that's what apple is very very good at what microsoft is very very bad at um and and what mark hopes to emulate with with unity and and everything else um it is still a great community is still a great place to work in

will it continue to be who knows no definite answers in there unfortunately here's the question um we're out of time we are out of time do come and talk to me afterwards thank you folks