July 26th, 2010 by This week I am at Guadec in Den Haag. For those less familiar with working on open-source projects Guadec is the annual gathering of developers, users and businesses primarily focused on GNOME. GNOME, for those of you who don’t know is the core desktop element of Ubuntu.
Explanations for the uninitiated now delivered, I will proceed with my news!
It all starts at breakfast, of course. Introductions to Andreas Proschofsky, Daniel Siegel of Cheese fame and hellos with lots of familiar faces.
I attended the Design Thinking workshop which was very well executed and I hereby declare my full intention to steal the Lego intros exercise.
The UX Advocates BOF session was an opportunity to talk more widely and it certainly highlights that there are quite a few real problems to overcome. I shall be very interested to see how the Shotwell UX Advocate experiment goes and look forward to using it to help us shape the initiative. I have committed to offering some mentoring to would-be UX Advocates and look forward to Allan Day telling me what my next duties are!
Good HIG session, lots to do! I know that our very own mpt can’t wait to get going.
The highlight of my day? A very Eurpoean kiss on both cheeks from the ever-charming Bastien Nocera.
Now for an evening of eating, drinking and solving problems. Toodle-pip!
The toolkit
"GNOME, for those of you who don’t know is the core desktop element of Ubuntu."
Oh, thanks for clarifying. It must be for this reason that Maverick login screen now shows "Ubuntu Desktop Edition" rather than the classic "GNOME", among the available DEs. It makes me think of Mark "Eddie Vedder" Shuttleworth singing: "It’s evolution, baby!"…
Hey Ivanka! Thanks for keeping this blog going, it’s nice to get frequent updates on what the design team is doing, I think more Ubuntu teams should do this. Keep up the good work!
Hi Jonathan: Nice of you to say so! Thank you.
@lelamal To a lot of users the word Gnome means nothing. I am sure there is nothing sinister about it. A Gnome login option will not help them make their choice.
@lelamal The Default DE in ubuntu is not vanilla GNOME,however you can install vanilla gnome from the repos I believe
@stapel: GNOME meant something to me, and to those users who installed alternative DEs intentionally. What doesn’t mean anything to me is "Ubuntu Desktop Edition", the first time I saw it I was puzzled. A sudden change none bothered announcing, nor explaining for that matter. But Canonical is having us used to such attitude, so no one complains anymore, and everyone guesses. What’s sinister, in my view, is users’ attitude in belittling every Canonical’s unacceptable behavior. We are losing are criticism, and are becoming no better than Apple’s fan-boys.
@Akshat: it wasn’t in Lucid as well (or Karmic, or…) but I can still see it called GNOME on the current LTS. What’s next? Should we expect to see any reference to Debian removed as well, to give new users the idea Ubuntu grew up from its on seed, like a strange self-pollinating exotic plant? The point is not to remind me where to install vanilla GNOME from, the point is to remove any reference to "the core desktop element of Ubuntu" from the login screen for the "benefit" of new users.
Are they planning to fork GNOME, or better still, are they planning to keep forking GNOME and give it the final blow? Is that the reason why we didn’t see any effort to adjust any of the latest developments in design and usability to the next version of GNOME? Not acknowledging its evolution and removing its name from login screen without a word, leaves little space to different explanations.
@lelamel: "A sudden change none bothered announcing, nor explaining for that matter." — Do you really want a press release for every single minor change in text ever? How you go from a change in the description of a CD to "OMG Canonical plans to destroy GNOME and Debian and take credit for inventing electricity!" is beyond me. Try taking a breath, calming down, and not immediately assuming evil intent behind every change.
Incidentally, I’m running maverick and have "About GNOME" under the System menu, just as it’s always been. If Canonical is trying to destroy GNOME and hide the evidence, strange that they’re still making that ‘about’ information easily visible.
(PS: I don’t notice "GNOME" anywhere on the default Fedora, Gentoo, or Debian login screens, either. This conspiracy goes deeper than we thought!)
> @lelamel
@fader: actually, that would be "lelamal", but I guess that’s OK anyway.
> Do you really want a press release for every single minor change in text
ever?
I never talked about a press release, but a blog post would have been nice and
shown a communicative attitude for the benefit of the whole community on which
Ubuntu – AND Canonical – thrive.
> How you go from a change in the description of a CD to "OMG Canonical plans
to destroy GNOME and Debian and take credit for inventing electricity!" is
beyond me. Try taking a breath, calming down, and not immediately assuming
evil intent behind every change.
I’m breathing normally, here, and have been calm all the time. It is not a
change relating to "a CD", as I’ve already explained extensively (please, read
my previous posts). The way you put it in quotes shows a hysteric behavior my
previous posts were clearly missing. Since you wonder, I’ll give you another
clue as to how I said what I said about Canonical’s ongoing semi-fork of
GNOME. The change that you deem irrelevant is just the tip of an iceberg that,
recently, is threatening to reveal itself in all its majesty. In case you
missed them, these exchanges might be illuminating:
http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/red-hat-16-canonical-1/
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/439
http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/its-not-about-tribalism-mark/
Don’t read just the blogger’s posts, but go deep into the comments to identify
the underlying sentiment I was talking about here.
> Incidentally, I’m running maverick and have "About GNOME" under the System
menu, just as it’s always been. If Canonical is trying to destroy GNOME and
hide the evidence, strange that they’re still making that ‘about’ information
easily visible.
Never talked about "destroy". Actually, my reasoning was a bit more elaborated
that "destroy". And, yeah, I had that too. My point was about the change
occurred; what has not changed (yet), instead, doesn’t prove much, does it?
And by the way, we’ll see how long will that one last, too. We’re still at
Alpha 3…