I’m back from GUADEC 2025. I’m still super tired, but I wanted to write down my thoughts before they vanish into the eternal void.

First let me start with a massive thank you for everyone that helped organize the event. It looked extremely well rounded, the kind of well rounded that can only be explained by a lot of work from the organizers. Thank you all!

Preparations

For this GUADEC I did something special: little calendars!

These were 3D printed from a custom model I’ve made, based on the app icon of GNOME Calendar. I brought a small batch to GUADEC, and to my surprise – and joy – they vanished in just a couple of hours in the first day! It was very cool to see the calendars around after that:

Talks

This year I gave two talks:

• GNOME Live Streaming & Outreach
• State of Portals

The first one was rather difficult. On the one hand, streaming GNOME development and interacting with people online for more than 6 years has given me many anecdotal insights about the social dynamics of free software. On the other hand, it was very difficult to materialize these insights and summarize them in form of a talk.

I’ve received good feedback about this talk, but for some reason I still left it feeling like it missed something . I don’t know what, exactly. But if anyone felt energized to try some streaming, goal accomplished I guess?

The second talk was just a regular update on the XDG Desktop Portal project. It was made with the sole intention of preparing territory for the Flatpak & Portals BoF that occurred later. Not much to say about it, it was a technical talk, with some good questions and discussions after that.

As for the talks that I’ve watched, to me there is one big highlight for this GUADEC: Emmanuelle’s “Getting Things Done in GNOME” .

Emmanuele published the contents of this talk in article form recently.

Sometimes, when we’re in the inflection point towards something, the right person with the right sensitivities can say the right things. I think that’s what Emmanuele did here. I think myself and others have already been feeling that the “maintainer”, in the traditional sense of the word, wasn’t a fitting description of how things have been working lately. Emmanuele gifted us with new vocabulary for that: “special interest group”. By the end of GUADEC, we were comfortably using this new descriptor.

Photography

It’s not exactly a secret that I started dipping my toes towards a long admired hobby: photography. This GUADEC was the first time I traveled with a camera and a lens, and actually attempted to document the highlights and impressions.

I’m not going to dump all of it here, but I found Brescia absolutely fascinating and fell in love with the colors and urban vision there. It’s not the most walkable or car-free city I’ve ever been, but there are certain aspects to it that caught my attention!

The buildings had a lovely color palette, sometimes bright, sometimes pastel:

Some of the textures of the material of walls were intriguing:

I fell in love with how Brescia lights itself:

I was fascinated by how many Vespas (and similar) could be found around the city, and decided to photograph them all! Some of the prettiest ones:

The prize for best modeling goes to Sri!

Conclusion

Massive thanks to everyone that helped organize GUADEC this year. It was a fantastic event. It was great to see old friends, and meet new people in there. There were many newcomers attending this GUADEC!

And here’s the GUADEC dinner group photo!