Direction Of GNOME To Be Discussed Next Month

Vincent Untz will be speaking at FOSDEM early next month in Brussels to "clarify the directions the GNOME project is taking, and to explain the rationale for various decisions." He's hoping that after this Belgian conference people will better understand the course of the GNOME desktop and begin to rebuild trust in the project.

The second set of 2013 interviews for the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting conference were posted to the FOSDEM web-site this week. Perhaps the most interesting interview is that of Vicent Untz talking about his main track talk.

The title of Vincent's 2013 talk is Has the GNOME community turned crazy? The talk abstract says, "The talk will clarify how the GNOME community works, and answer several hot questions (GNOME OS, dependency on systemd, fallback mode, etc.) from the perspective of someone involved in the project for more than ten years."

In this week's interview, Vicent Untz says, "I want to clarify the directions the GNOME project is taking, and to explain the rationale for various decisions. My end goal is to make people understand the project better, and trust it again. One important challenge for GNOME today is that some people are unhappy about it and blaming it for different woes. Sometimes, when reading comments, I feel that the person believes the GNOME community just wants to destroy the world. It’s also relatively easy to find misinformed comments… Of course, GNOME is not perfect and there are certainly valid reasons to complain about it. But there are also many happy users! I’ve discussed with people switching back to a free software desktop thanks to GNOME 3, for instance. If I manage to debunk some myths about GNOME and to have people get a clearer vision about what GNOME is doing, then the talk will have been useful."

Vincent will also talk about GNOME 3.8 dropping the fallback mode, GNOME OS, GNOME in mobile, systemd in GNOME, developers listening to end-users about GNOME3, and other thoughts.

If you missed it, be sure to check out the 2012 GNOME User Survey Results. I'll be at FOSDEM 2013, taking place as usual in Brussels the first weekend of February, so expect details of the GNOME talk and the other interesting development tracks on Phoronix as well as through my Twitter account.