Greetings readers of the future from my favourite open technology event of the year. I am hanging out with the people who develop the GNOME platform talking about interesting stuff.

Being realistic, I won’t have time to make a readable writeup of the event. So I’m going to set myself a challenge: how much can I write up of the event so far, in 15 minutes?

Let’s go!

Conversations and knowledge

Conferences involve a series of talks, usually monologues on different topics, with slides and demos. A good talk leads to multi-way conversations.

One thing I love about open source is: it encourages you to understand how things work. Big tech companies want you to understand nothing about your devices beyond how to put in your credit card details and send them money. Sharing knowledge is cool, though. If you know how things work then you can fix it yourself.

Structures

Last year, I also attended the conference and was left with a big question for the GNOME project: “What is our story?” (Inspired by an excellent keynote from Ryan Sipes about the Thunderbird email app, and how it’s supported by donations).

We didn’t answer that directly, but I have some new thoughts.

Open source desktops are more popular than ever. Apparently we have like 5% of the desktop market share now. Big tech firms are nowadays run as huge piles of cash, whose story is that they need to make more cash, in order to give it to shareholders, so that one day you can, allegedly, have a pension. Their main goal isn’t to make computers do interesting things. The modern for-profit corporation is a super complex institution, with great power, which is often abused.

Open communities like GNOME are an antidote to that. With way fewer people, they nevertheless manage to produce better software in many cases, but in a way that’s demanding, fun, chaotic, mostly leaderless and which frequently burns out volunteers who contribute.

Is the GNOME project’s goal to make computers do interesting things? For me, the most interesting part of the conference so far was the focus on project structure . I think we learned some things about how independent, non-profit communities can work, and how they can fail, and how we can make things better.

In a world where political structures are being heavily tested and, in many cases, are crumbling, we would do well to talk more about structures, and to introspect a bit more on what works and what doesn’t. And to highlight the amazing work that the GNOME Foundation’s many volunteer directors have achieved over the last 30 years to create an institution that still functions today, and in many ways functions a lot better than organizations with significantly more resources.

Relevant talks

• Stephen Deobold’s keynote
• Emmanuele’s talk on teams

Teams

Emmanuele Bassi tried, in a friendly way, to set fire to long-standing structures around how the GNOME community agrees and disagrees changes to the platform. Based on ideas from other successful projects that are driven by independent, non-profit communities such as the Rust and Python programming languages.

Part of this idea is to create well-defined teams of people who collaborate on different parts of the GNOME platform.

I’ve been contributing to GNOME in different ways for a loooong time, partly due to my day job, where I sometimes work with the technology stack, and partly because its a great group of people, we get to meet around the world once a year, and make software that’s a little more independent from the excesses and the exploitation of modern capitalism, or technofuedalism.

And I think it’s going to be really helpful to organize my contributions according to a team structure with a defined form.

Search

I really hope we’ll have a search team.

I don’t have much news about search. GNOME’s indexer (localsearch) might start indexing the whole home directory soon. Carlos Garnacho continues to heroically make it work really well.

QA / Testing / Developer Experience

I did a talk at the conference (and half of another one with Martín Abente Lahaye) , about end-to-end testing using openQA.

The talks were pretty successful, they lead to some interesting conversations with new people. I hope we’ll continue to grow the Linux QA call and try to keep these conversations going, and try to share knowledge and create better structures so that paid QA engineers who are testing products built with GNOME can collaborate on testing upstream.

Freeform notes

I’m 8 minutes over time already so the rest of this will be freeform notes from my notepad.

Live-coding streams aren’t something I watch or create. It’s an interesting way to share knowledge with the new generation of people who have grown up with internet videos as a primary knowledge source. I don’t have age stats for this blog, but I’m curious how many readers under 30 have read this far down. (Leave a comment if you read this and prove me wrong! : -)

systemd-sysexts for development are going to catch on.

There should be karaoke every year.

Fedora Silverblue isn’t actively developed at the moment. bootc is something to keep an eye on.

GNOME Shell Extensions are really popular and are a good “gateway drug” to get newcomers involved. Nobody figured out a good automated testing story for these yet. I wonder if there’s a QA project there? I wonder if there’s a low-cost way to allow extension developers to test extensions?

Legacy code is “code without tests”. I’m not sure I agree with that.

“Toolkits are transient, apps are forever”. That’s spot-on.

There is a spectrum between being a user and a developer. It’s not a black-and-white distinction.

BuildStream is still difficult to learn and the documentation isn’t a helpful getting started guide for newcomers.

We need more live demos of accessibility tools. I still don’t know how you use the screen reader. I’d like to have the computer read to me.

That’s it for now. It took 34 minutes to empty my brain into my blog, more than planned, but a necessary step. Hope some of it was interesting. See you soon!