Has the GNOME community gone crazy?
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FOSDEM 201349 / 90
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
OK, thank you. Can you hear me? Maybe not that much. This is better. OK, so thanks for coming for my talk. I hope you're not here for the closing session. It's one hour later. This is just a talk about GNOME.
00:21
So I'm Vincent Unse. I've been contributing to GNOME since 2002. I've been doing a lot of things in the project. Nowadays, I'm actually mostly idling. I actually work on the cloud at SUSE. But I still care a lot about the project. I'm still following it. And from time to time, I go to events like FOSDEM
00:42
and have a talk about GNOME. The reason I wanted to talk about the GNOME community and if it has gone crazy or not is that we keep hearing stuff like the desktop is dead. However, since GNOME 3 went out, we saw so many news,
01:07
so many articles about how GNOME 3 is horrible or how great it is, or so many emotions expressed about the GNOME itself that I think this is actually not that true. Sure, people love the new tablets, the new smartphones,
01:21
and so on. But people actually still care a lot about their desktop because they use it daily to do their work. So it's still an important thing for them. And as a GNOME contributor, I read these articles. And I usually like to spend some time reading comments.
01:43
And after a while, I get a feeling that people just feel that way. GNOME people hate the world. They just want to destroy the planet. They made GNOME 3, too, because they hate the world. Obviously, that's not true. If we do GNOME, that's because we believe in something.
02:02
We believe that what we are producing is a good desktop, that it's better than what we had before. And I've even heard people switching away from other OS or desktops saying that GNOME 2 was so-so,
02:21
but GNOME 3 is really a magic change for them. But still, we get that feeling a lot. And that's what makes me feel like the killer GNOME. So yeah, the goal of this talk
02:40
is actually to try to convey a bit our ideas in GNOME and why we're doing stuff this way and not that way and try also to debunk some myths. So first, I would like to start with a quick survey in the room. I assume everybody knows what GNOME is. Hopefully, if you want to pause them, you know.
03:02
I'd like to know who in the room used GNOME 1. I'm not raising my hand because it's not true. OK, that's quite a bit of people. Who used GNOME 2? OK, so I'm getting curious.
03:21
Who used some other desktop? OK, still. It gave the feeling that it was the majority, but OK. Did you like GNOME 2, actually? I mean, yeah, OK. Now, who is using GNOME 3? Oh, that's quite a bit of people.
03:42
Who hates GNOME 3? Ah, cool, I like it. Who is using GNOME 3 and hates it? OK, interesting. And so, yeah, I have one last question.
04:02
Do you think that this guy looks incredibly clever? Thank you to the five people who raised their hand. OK, I like to have a picture of myself during the talks. It's a big screen, so cool. So yeah, I want to talk a bit about some myths
04:22
that we keep hearing. I think they're mostly caused by emotional reactions to GNOME 3. When you read comments, it's really like people don't argue why they don't like GNOME 3. They're just saying some stuff, they repeat that. They don't even know if that's true.
04:41
Maybe they've not even tried GNOME 3. And so there are a lot of stories going on, and it's so wrong that I feel that we have to just explain why that's wrong. So first, nobody loves GNOME 3. We see that a lot. So I've seen a few people in the room, like half of the room,
05:02
who love GNOME 3. So that's clearly wrong. Sorry? That's true. Actually, that's a good point. Who loves GNOME 3, then? Let's see. Yeah, I ask who use it and who hates it.
05:20
You know, I was, anyway. And so obviously, people who say that nobody loves GNOME 3, they're just expressing what they believe, what they feel. But it's not true. So that was kind of obvious. Something else which I hear a lot, which is not really a myth, more of an opinion, I hear a lot of people saying
05:44
that we should have stayed closer to what GNOME 2 was, that it was perfect. You shouldn't have changed it at all, and so on. Clearly, for me, that's wrong. That's wrong for so many reasons. The first reason is that the GNOME desktop
06:01
is made by the GNOME community. And the GNOME community wanted to change, wanted to do something different. So we couldn't have just stayed with GNOME 2 the way it was. It was not an option for us. The other thing which is important to see is that if you go back to GNOME 2 from GNOME 3,
06:21
you see how old, I would say, it feels. It's really a previous generation, I would say. It was good, very good, very solid. But it was not a desktop for today. But for people who really believe that, it's fine.
06:42
It's OK. You can use other desktops. There is XFCE, MATE, and so on. It's OK. You don't have to use GNOME 3 to like it. We think it's better, but that's an opinion. Recently, I think it was two, three months ago,
07:01
there was this going around, GNOME doesn't care about the extensions. If we have extensions, why wouldn't we care about extensions? It was really like people saying, yeah, GNOME developers say that there are extensions, but really, you shouldn't use them. It shouldn't be part of the desktop and so on.
07:23
This all goes back to the beginning of GNOME 3. When the extension mechanism was created, it was more like an experimentation. And so we were not really sure if we wanted to go that way or not. And so people had different opinions in the project. But with time, we really adopted extensions.
07:43
We've created a website to allow people to publish extensions, to install them. We have a new classic mode in GNOME 3.8, which is made with extensions. So really, we actually encourage people to use extensions. It's something which is really great, I think. And it's part of the GNOME 3 experience.
08:01
So this is clearly wrong. We've heard that since I joined the project 10 years ago, I guess. We keep removing options and features. That's why we hate the world, I guess. I understand why people feel that way.
08:23
Usually, we do a UI, and we try to produce the best UI possible. It means that we cannot put all the options in the UI. It's simply not possible. You will not have something which is usable, good for every user, if you put all the options there. So we make decisions.
08:41
We make choices. It turns out that we have many, many, many options which are not exposed in the UI that people can use. Turns out that you can use extensions or plugins to do what you think should be different. For features, often, it's just
09:00
that it's a temporary step because we're trying to provide something different. And we hear a lot during the development cycle that this was removed from, I don't know, Eye of GNOME or Notelius, and this is so bad. But it's the development cycle. We need, at some point, to remove something if we want to provide another feature which
09:20
we feel is better. So it's usually temporary. So it's kind of wrong in my opinion. The next one is also, we hear that a lot. But we don't talk about it a lot, I think. So GNOME is supposed to be a Red Hat project.
09:41
I work at SUSE, so I don't know if I would really participate in a Red Hat only project. This is clearly not true. First thing is that that's true. We have a lot of Red Hat people contributing to GNOME, it's definitely true. But if you look at these people, before joining Red Hat,
10:02
they were working on GNOME. And they joined Red Hat because they were doing great stuff in GNOME. It's just that Red Hat is good at hiring people from GNOME, and that's great. And we're quite happy about that. But these people, and I mean, I see a lot of them there.
10:21
Before being Red Hat employees, they're GNOME people. They wouldn't do something against GNOME. And it's really important to understand that. When you believe that there is corporate influence in the GNOME project, first realize that the people contributing to the project are community people
10:42
before being employees. Other than that, what we do is that in the governance structure of the GNOME project, we have specific rules to avoid one entity to be too much powerful. Like for the GNOME Foundation, you can have two, more than two board members from the same company.
11:03
Same for the release team, actually. So it's something which can be perceived that way because of the amount of Red Hat people working on GNOME. But it's definitely true, definitely not true, sorry. There was also some statistics made a few years ago
11:21
from Dave Neri, I've actually not looked at the PDF, but it was more or less saying that the first contributor was actually the community. So it's before all community projects. We've heard that also, all GNOME developers
11:40
left the project. So that started like before Lascuarec, with a post from someone from the community, saying that Emanuele Bassey and myself were moving on to some other things. It was quite funny because we're both at Guarec when reading that post.
12:04
So obviously, I mean, people in the community who have been there for 10 years, they might want to move on to something else. That's like, I started moving to the cloud because I wanted to work on something else. I still care about GNOME, I still contribute to GNOME in different ways. But that's life, it's okay.
12:21
And we have new people joining, that's okay. And I mean, I don't look that old, really. Anyway. The biggest myth, I guess, is GNOME doesn't listen to feedback. Everybody is saying that. When you want to complain about that, about GNOME,
12:41
GNOME doesn't listen to feedback. So just examples. I don't have anything, but we've also heard
13:00
a lot of people complaining about the notification area, the button, saying that it was not usable, easy to miss stuff, and so on. So there was a lot of work to improve that. Still not perfect, I guess, but it's getting better. So there's this, and this is the classic mode, which is coming, thanks to Matthias for the screenshot,
13:22
because I have not tried it myself. It looks like GNOME 2, actually, if you look. It's same colors, task list, applications menu. Sorry? Yeah, the places menu, I guess. The clock is not centered, which is really important,
13:43
I guess. And so on. I mean, it looks like GNOME 2, more or less. Oh yeah, the minimize button, there. Yes, really important, also. And I guess alt-tab is also the classic one, by window, not application, I guess.
14:03
So I'll talk a bit more about that later, but this is really, we made that for users, because we heard a lot of people wanting that, and this is really based on the feedback from people.
14:21
We also hear that we are not friendly with new developers. I guess the last example I have from that is two weeks ago, some people decided to fork some of the fallback mode components, including GNOME Panel, and there were comments like,
14:44
yeah, we tried to connect to the GNOME people that were not really receptive, and if you want to blame someone, blame Vincent. Okay, so I was okay. I went back to my mailbox to look at that,
15:02
and had a discussion with a guy in June 2012, telling him, I don't think your patch can go in right now, but I would be happy to have you become a co-maintainer, and we could probably make your patch
15:20
walk out in the end by dropping the fallback mode, so we can walk on that together, and I have not heard from him since then, and I mean, I was really trying to be open to help him do what he wanted to do, and no, that doesn't work.
15:42
In general, what we do is that we want people to contribute. Sometimes we reject patches. It's not because we don't like the new developers. It's because the patches might not work with the design we want to achieve. That's okay. People shouldn't turn away for that, and so we have new patches from new people
16:01
coming in all the time, so this is just wrong again, and it's like all the free software projects. You can have contributions, and sometimes they are rejected, and the last myth I have is that GNOME is not as active as it used to be,
16:22
so Alberto, who is somewhere here, I guess. I don't see him. Yeah, you are here. Made some statistic for GTK because there was a specific example for GTK. That was the number of people contributing to GTK according to the Git commits.
16:40
This is not including translations, and so I was talking to Alberto earlier today, and he was telling me that actually he didn't do the stats correctly. It should probably be higher than that because you remove too many people, and so you see it's growing. We have more people contributing,
17:00
so it's more active as it used to be, so that's quite good. Arguably, what I'm saying is that everything is perfect, which is clearly not the case, so I'll drink some water, and I'll leave you with this question.
17:25
What do you think? Was it ready or not? Yes. I was the release manager, so. Okay, so a lot of people feel no, I guess.
17:42
There are different ways to approach this question. The way I see it is that, let me show the next slide. It helps a lot. That's how we developed GNOME for 10 years, so for the first two release, 2.0 and 2.2
18:00
in the GNOME 2 cycle, it was not a six-month development cycle, but after that, you can see September, March, September, March, since 2003 to 2010, so we have this cadence of releases, and when doing GNOME 3,
18:22
we wanted to keep working in evolutionary way, so step-by-step, and still, this is kind of conflicting with the GNOME of GNOME 3, which was proposing a new user experience, so what we did is that we actually delayed GNOME 3 twice,
18:41
I believe. Because it was not ready at that point, and when we finally released it, I think it was actually good enough. It was not perfect, but it was good enough. We could have done something like enlightenment
19:01
and wait for 10 years for E17. That works fine, except for our community, it doesn't work at all. We like to release stuff, so there was also some pressure internally to just stop moving on, and I think it went quite well, and there's something to really understand,
19:23
that people, that we have not communicated properly, I guess, it's more awful than everybody else's fault. It's that GNOME 3.0 is not GNOME 3. It's the beginning. It's like on this slide. If you go back to GNOME 2.0,
19:42
actually, try to use it again. Just use it in a VM. Then use 2.32 or 2.30, whatever, and you'll see a huge difference, and still, it was the same direction. It was the same project. It was all of GNOME 2, and just try it. You'll see how horrible GNOME 2.0 was.
20:04
Back then, it was quite good, but still horrible. And also, I hear a lot, people comparing GNOME 3.0 with KDE 4, the KDE 4.0 release, which was different.
20:21
The KDE 4.0 release had different issues. I think it was more of a communication issue that it was not a release for users, but for developers, while our GNOME 3.0 release was for users, definitely. And yeah, so it was working. In my opinion, it was ready. It's a matter of opinion.
20:40
People might disagree, but I think it was ready, and we needed to release it to start moving again for GNOME 3.0. The next topic, which is interesting to many people, I guess, is GNOME OS. Who heard about GNOME OS?
21:03
Everybody, more or less. Who knows what GNOME OS is? Interesting. So, Ryan, you say to everybody that they're lying? You know what it is?
21:25
So, it's really interesting. That's a name which appeared at GUADEC. Not sure which GUADEC. I think it was in 2010. Yeah. And there are different interpretation of what GNOME OS is.
21:44
Depending on who you ask, it's a different thing. My understanding of what it is, which is my understanding, I think it's close to what most people agree on inside the project, is that it's not an OS. It's a code name for big goals
22:03
that we want to set for the project. Big goals, which includes working on the user experience, working on how to develop applications for the OS, which is something below GNOME and GNOME.
22:21
We had, by the way, a developer documentation hackfest, so developer experience hackfest is last week in Brussels. It's also about integration of GNOME and what's below GNOME. That means getting our hands dirty
22:41
with stuff like the kernel, the boot system, maybe, I don't know, and stuff like that. So, the reason it's called GNOME OS is that to provide a user experience the way we want, we cannot just provide a desktop.
23:02
We need to work on the entire operating system to push our GNOME ideals, I would say, to the lower part of the stack to provide an OS. It doesn't mean that we will distribute this as an OS. It doesn't mean that we want to kill distributions. Some of us want to kill distributions,
23:20
but that's not the goal of the project. It's really a code name, and we failed to explain that to people. So, that's something where we did a bad job, I guess, communication. It's really, we're not good at that. In a similar way, GNOME 4.0.
23:41
So, actually, there was a release team meeting like two hours ago, so I'm not sure if what I'm going to say is right. But at the last Guadec, there was one presentation by, I think, Igalian people. So, two people from the Igalia company. Not sure, I don't remember who exactly it was.
24:02
And they kind of ended the talk with a suggestion, which was to make something to reach GNOME 4, the GNOME 4 version. It was a suggestion done to the GNOME community during a GNOME event, which makes sense. I mean, if you want to discuss about this topic,
24:20
that's a good place. Like a few hours later, it made Slashdot. GNOME is going to make 4.0. And you could read comments like, oh yeah, they're going to destroy the world again. So, it was just a suggestion. And it might make sense, actually, to do that.
24:42
I don't know if we have some new specific goals, it might make sense. I personally believe that we can go on with GNOME 3 for a few years because we've not achieved exactly what we wanted to do with GNOME 3. But right now, yeah, I think there's no reason to do GNOME 4.0. Now, the release team had everything two hours ago.
25:02
I don't know. We also have the question of tablets as a target for GNOME. Is it the case, is it true or not? People saying that GNOME 3 sucks because it's made for tablets. It's not true. We don't make GNOME 3 for tablets.
25:22
We make GNOME 3 for this kind of stuff. Heavy computers, it's too heavy. For, still it's a laptop, for real computers. But we want to keep in mind that new devices,
25:40
which are still computers, now have a touch screen. If you look at the new laptops which are getting out for Windows 8, they nearly all have a touch screen, I guess. And it's not something that we can ignore. We need to be ready for that. So we make GNOME Touch aware. We make it GNOME Touch ready.
26:02
It requires a lot of work, both in the platform, in the applications, in the shell, and so on. But it's not made for tablets. That doesn't mean that you cannot use the GNOME platform to make some user experience for tablets,
26:20
but that's not what we are doing today. It might become a goal at some point. Could make sense, but it's not the goal today. We also have a lot of questions about the support for GNOME in BSDs, GNU Herd, and whatever other OS.
26:43
This comes a lot because we depend on technologies which are developed for the Linux scanner, quite often. And that's because we actually need these technologies to provide something in the user experience. It's not just for fun, just for depending on something which is Linux only.
27:01
It's really because we need that for the user experience. And so we have a choice. Either we just slow down, wait for all the OS out there to just catch up with what's happening in the Linux world. We continue and we proceed and we do our stuff.
27:23
And so the sad truth is that if you look at the GNOME community, I would say that 99.999% are people running a Linux channel and not at BSD or Herd. And I'm saying that I like BSD a lot, actually. But that's the truth.
27:40
And so from a purely practical point of view, we don't want to wait forever. We want to move on. So it doesn't mean that we don't want support on BSDs and so on. We encourage people to do that. We will help people to do that.
28:01
We want that to happen. But we will not wait for that to happen. So we keep moving. So if you're worried about GNOME not working on a different OS, you can step up and help. And that would be most welcome, really. That leads us to systemd,
28:22
the favorite topic of many people, I guess. So who likes systemd? Oh, who hates systemd? Oh, cool, I'm really surprised. Is Lenart here? Okay, who hates Lenart?
28:43
Nobody? Interesting. So yes, we do have a dependency on systemd for a few features. It was a hot topic a few months ago. The question is whether we needed to have systemd for that or not.
29:00
And it goes back to the same topic as the one before. We want to move on. And systemd enables us to do a few things better. So for some features, we allow a dependency on systemd. But what we decided is that we won't allow a dependency on systemd for core stuff in GNOME.
29:22
So you should be able to run GNOME without systemd. You will be missing some features. But that's okay, you can still use most of GNOME. That's fine. And so yeah, it's the same reason that we don't want to slow down for vsd.
29:41
We believe that systemd is a good change. So we want to make use of it. One other topic which is interesting is the fallback mode, which we're dropping for 3.8. That raised a lot of questions. So I'll go back to the classic mode that I talked about earlier.
30:03
There's a lot of stuff to say. I've been working on some of the fallback mode components for 10 years, so I know that quite a bit. When we did GNOME 3, we were faced with the issue
30:20
that GNOME Shell required 3D acceleration in the driver, the graphic driver. And at that point in time, so two years ago, that was not a given. It was difficult to ensure that it was the case all the time, especially if you really wanted
30:42
to use free drivers, which you should use, not proprietary drivers and blobs and so on. So we created the fallback mode, which was made of the same components as in GNOME 2, mostly Metacity, GNOME Panel, the notification daemon,
31:06
Paul King GNOME, and a few others. And the idea was to use that as a fallback mode. It turned out that some people, and quite a lot of people, were actually using it not as a fallback mode,
31:22
but as an alternative mode, which for them was better than the GNOME Shell. So it was an issue for us when a few months ago, we realized that the fallback mode was not that well maintained, and that the alternatives were actually okay,
31:45
like using LLVM pipe and so on. So we decided to drop it, but at the same time, we realized that even inside the GNOME community, we had people relying on that, relying on this user experience, which was different.
32:03
So what we did is we listened to the feedback, and so we created this classic mode, which is going to appear in 3.8 in one month and a half, two months. And I think it's a good replacement for the fallback mode.
32:23
It's not based on old technologies that will not be maintained anymore, that were not really maintained anyway. It's not going to cause much issues of integration because of change in some other components of GNOME, which was a big issue with the old fallback mode.
32:43
And so in the end, I think it's going to be a better experience for the people who want to use such an experience. So one related topic is what happens when you have no 3D acceleration? Can you still use GNOME? So as I mentioned, LLVM pipe made some good progress.
33:03
So it should start to be a serious option. We've been working on a specific mode where when you don't have 3D acceleration, we will have less animations. Correct me if I'm wrong, Bastien. That was the plan, I think.
33:22
And so that, it works much better. It's also worth mentioning at this point that this is becoming less and less an issue nowadays. The graphic drivers, the free graphic drivers have made huge progress in the past few years
33:43
and it's actually harder to find a machine where you don't have 3D acceleration. You still have some edge cases, which might not be edge cases in a few years, but we'll see. Like on ARM, the graphic drivers are not really free, so there's no good alternative for that.
34:04
But it's just a matter of time. Things are going to improve there. So yeah, 3D acceleration, you can live without it with GNOME now. I still have 15 minutes, so I'll go quickly. Okay, I often hear questions about Cinema Mate Unity
34:22
and so on and other alternatives to GNOME, which have their roots inside the GNOME project, but are different now. What's really interesting when you look at them is that they're actually still for 70, 80%,
34:42
it's hard to tell, GNOME projects. That means that if you run such a desktop, sure, the shell is different, but a lot of what they're using is really pure GNOME. It's just GNOME, not modified. And we actually have, I mean,
35:03
I don't know for the whole GNOME community, but I've been talking to some of the people working on these projects. And for instance, for MATE, so when they started to do MATE, what they did was take GNOME to fork everything, which was just insane because GNOME is huge, and they were not a big community back then.
35:23
And so they realized this mistake, and they started working with others. They decided that it makes sense to use upstream GNOME components directly, that was fine. And now they're just trying to minimize the difference between what they want,
35:41
what they need to achieve what they want to do, and what GNOME is. So it's pretty cool. And I guess the most important question is, is it bad that we have all that? And I think it's not. If people want to do something different, it's perfectly fine. And I think it's actually better
36:01
than a never-ending conflict inside the GNOME project, where we would have to camp to sites where people would just block each other. So it's good. And if people manage to do something that they like, it's fine with me.
36:21
So where are we now? Is this a crazy community or not? So what do you think? Is GNOME crazy? Is GNOME community crazy? Yes? No? Do you care? Okay. So nobody's listening.
36:41
That's perfect. I mean, I can go on. So it depends what you mean with crazy. What is for sure that we are creating a desktop, which is not without opinions. We make strong design decisions.
37:02
They might make some people unhappy, but we do that because we believe it's better for what we produce. It's important for us. And it's something that people, I mean, people are saying a lot that, yeah, maybe they could leave this small stuff and that would make me perfectly happy.
37:21
But if you accumulate all that, in the end, you end up with a desktop which is not GNOME anymore. You just have everything that everybody wants. But the desires of the people are conflicting, so it's not really possible. Anyway, this leads me to something which is interesting.
37:43
I should have mentioned that earlier. But the GNOME project had an influence on a lot of different projects out there. I guess the most visible thing, which people might not realize, but it's really, for someone who comes from a release team
38:03
the GNOME release team, it's really highly visible, is the release cycle of GNOME every six months. Turns out that if you look at most distributions out there, they are using the same cycle. It's aligned with GNOME. And what happened because of that is that a lot of other projects are using the same cycle.
38:22
Now I'm working on OpenStack. Guess what? It's using the GNOME development cycle every six months. And I mean, it has nothing to do with GNOME, but we managed to create this cadence that everybody is following. I mean, we didn't create that. Some of the projects were doing that before GNOME,
38:41
but we made that really popular. One other thing which is interesting is that when we did GNOME 2, we focused a lot on usability, and now we focus on user experience. And back then, it was actually something that people were not doing, and now it's really part of what every project
39:01
which has a user-facing interface is doing. If you take Ubuntu, the way I summarize the creation of Ubuntu is that it's Debian plus GNOME. That's really, if you look at the goals of the Ubuntu projects initially, it was really to create something usable by everybody,
39:23
and they used GNOME for that for a reason. I have so many slides. I wanted to explain why this is the case, why GNOME 3.0 is different from GNOME 3, by listing all the different features we've had since GNOME 3.0.
39:42
I don't have time for that, so go see the release note of 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, and in one month, 3.8, and you'll realize that we've added all that, and it's starting to feel actually quite different, but it's closer to what we want GNOME 3 to be. I think the most important thing
40:00
is that we are still learning. When we do GNOME, we make mistakes. That's fine, I mean, we are still learning. We are doing stuff. We believe it's good, and sometimes we make mistakes. We revert that, but we are doing that with good faith,
40:21
and that's okay, in my opinion, and we are also listening to people, so feedback is welcome. If you disagree with something, you can shout and say, whoa, you hate people. That's okay, but if you say,
40:41
this is not good because of A, B, and C, this will be much more helpful to us because we will know why you miss something, why we should revert or propose a different feature set. So that's it. That's what I had. We have a few minutes for questions, I guess. 10 minutes.
41:02
Thank you. There's someone on the right.
41:22
Not someone on the right. Okay, now I've got a microphone again. I'm more of a user, and last time I tried to find out
41:42
if what GNOME would do for me, I couldn't find any definition of what the goals are. Did that change? Sorry, I didn't get the... The definition of what GNOME wants to be. Is there anything like that? Of what GNOME wants to be.
42:02
For me, it's a project which is producing a desktop that you will use on your computer and that will make your life better. So there's no agreed on document somewhere I can refer to?
42:20
Do we have a document for that? Explaining that? That's your question? Yeah, the question is if there's a document where people... I haven't looked at the new GNOME website in a while, but I think it's probably on the about page. Because that's something we had a lot of discussion about that. The whole GNOME website didn't mention that clearly,
42:42
but I think we've improved that now on the new GNOME website. Yeah, free software obviously. I mean, it's not open source, it's free software by the way.
43:03
Do you have a rough idea of how the switch to GNOME 3 impacted the user base in numbers? No. Well, personally I don't. Maybe some others have worked on that, but it's extremely difficult for us because people don't fetch GNOME from us directly.
43:24
They use a distribution. So, I don't have a rough idea, but what I see at events is that I still see as many GNOME people running GNOME on their laptops. So, I don't see a big difference.
43:42
I have a number for you. Between Fedora 14 and Fedora 15, the number of Fedora downloads went down by 45%. Downloads from what? Fedora. Fedora 15. 15 downloads, which was the first distribution to ship GNOME 3.
44:01
Wow. Think about it. I can think about it, but it's a distribution, I mean, I'm happy to think about it, but it's hard to relate the numbers for distribution to the numbers of GNOME. It's not a direct relationship, so.
44:25
You talked a little bit about the 3D acceleration. You talked about the 3D acceleration. If you look at the number of hardware varieties that are out there, there's a lot of hardware that is not desktop oriented that has 3D cards,
44:42
especially on the server side. I mean, more than ARM, even on x86, right? So, how do we deal with that side of the house? How do we deal with that? We try to create drivers for them, I guess.
45:00
From the GNOME perspective, as we target the desktop on computers, traditional computers, it's less of an issue for now, I would say. But obviously, it's a challenge for the whole community in general, not just for GNOME. We need to have good drivers for all the hardware out there. So, we need to work on that.
45:22
And I believe that it's, I mean, harsh to say it that way, but I believe that by requiring 3D acceleration, we will help people to move in that direction. Hi, I've been using GNOME
45:41
for about three, four years now, and I just wanted to say thank you. I know that a lot of people are bitching and complaining that they don't like it, it's different, but it's free, and I love it. It's good to hear.
46:06
So, I heard that you guys are working on an application SDK, and I'm wondering, are you guys talking with Canonical and the KDE guys, and I don't know what instance is about the free desktop,
46:21
or into specifying some of this stuff to reduce fragmentation and this kind of sadness? Did you write that question to somebody here who was at the Hackfest this week? So, I can tell you that,
46:41
so I'm Bastien Osera. I'm on the GNOME Foundation board of directors. I wasn't at the developer Hackfest, but I can tell you that we are working on setting up something that would be more like a free desktop conference where people from different desktops can come together
47:03
and we can make sure that applications running on one, run also on the other, and integration actually works. Ryan, I know, has done a lot of work on making sure that top-level menus, for example, in GNOME Shell work in the same way in Unity,
47:22
and there's a lot of work being done on making sure the applications are usable on both of them. After that, if you want to really integrate into one system, you're going to have to choose which desktop, which environment you really want to target, but for a lot of applications
47:42
that don't need deep-level integration, there is work ongoing to help that, especially from third parties that aren't targeted on a particular desktop. Are there any plans to make GTK Plus a more modern toolkit, which is feature-wise on par?
48:03
Sorry, can you repeat that? Are there any plans to make GTK Plus a more modern toolkit from a technical point of view, like that is feature-wise more comparable to Qt, or, Qt is a bad example, but maybe Java FX or something?
48:20
We have a lot of plans. Right now, one of the big things that's happening right now, and it's kind of annoying a lot of people, I guess, is we're really modernizing the theme engine for making CSS-based themes. Designers can make them. They have modern animations. That's working nicely. We're planning next to move on to making it more actor-based with the eventual goal of probably merging Clutter and GTK.
48:44
We want to revamp the input system so that instead of, like as a widget, you see button down event, button up event, you see the idea that the user executed a click, like in the sense of button down and button up without moving too far. We have a lot of plans for these. A lot of them are in motion.
49:02
We want help. It would be great. If people want to help us on GTK, making it a modern toolkit, we would love this. Right now, there is a small manpower problem in GTK, but yes, there are plans, and some things are happening right now. Oh, and touch, yeah. We have like multi-touch in GTK right now.
49:22
Like a lot of the scrolling stuff, if you have a tablet, this is already working, and it's just gonna get better in the coming releases. Hi, I was wondering what features of GNOME depend on systemd. Can you expand a bit on that? Depend on what? systemd.
49:45
So it, I actually don't know which feature. Power management, I'm being told. And? Okay, that's all? Well, I guess also the fast user switching.
50:04
No, the fast user switching can still use console kit. In GNOME 3.8, we use systemd for power management, and we've been able to kill a lot of bugs by removing that, we try to do everything with all the backends, and U-Power add a lot of bugs
50:23
by getting fixed by using systemd. Like for example, if you've ever seen, if you select to lock the screen when you suspend, in an awful lot of cases, you would resume your machine and you would see the desktop during half a second. That's because U-Power was trying to send a signal
50:44
but it was suspending at the same time, and it just wasn't possible with that particular infrastructure to fix the bugs. And switching to systemd actually provides us with something stable, with something reliable to be able to make things work.
51:00
So for bug fixing, systemd is required for power management in GNOME 3.8. But you can, if you use something else, if you're a third party that relies on GNOME settings daemon and the GNOME stack to, for your desktop, you can re-implement it
51:21
or use the old code, but it's not gonna, it's still gonna work as badly as it did before. It's quite convenient to have people to answer questions for me. Okay, one last question and then time's over.
51:54
Thank you. I would like to know what have we learned from all this, to avoid to do these mistakes again.
52:06
What have we learned, because the first thing you tell us about GNOME OS is that it's not an OS. Yes, we also had a lot of news and awful news
52:22
and awful publicity about some GWADEC presentations because we hadn't an official view and only slides online so people could imagine all they wanted about that because they were not at GWADEC, while we had some feedback from the talkers
52:42
and from everyone and could hear the context. How do you think we can improve that and avoid those mistakes? So, the first thing we learned is that we're bad at communication.
53:00
We usually, we don't explain things, whether it's a feature or change or whatever, or the way we are working. So, we're not doing a good job there, and it has started to change actually. If you look at the, during the last development cycle,
53:21
you can find blog posts about the new features, what's going to happen, so people can send feedback earlier and so on. So, that's one thing we've learned. The other thing that, I don't know if we've learned that but we know that, is that we don't have a good way
53:43
to take the feedback from so many different sources and analyze that and produce something useful to the developers. Are we lacking something there? We are aware of that, but we don't have a good solution for that right now.
54:02
I guess that's it. Thank you. So, thank you very much. Thanks.