Re: Question to the candidates (what is a complete desktop?)
Replying inline to your reply (stripping my own previous text): [...] I'm not asking you to be technical, but to be managers. (Not saying here that manager can/should/must be non-technical) [...] Being a director of the board for me, means having the power to allocate resources to make GNOME better, gather the community consensus and improve HDPi support the way we did once, for instance. [...] So far, you've tell me what you want, not how to accomplish it. And I know, we as community provide a huge pools of ideas and discussion, but I would love to know how each candidate thinks about it. I would like a board of directors to be strong leaders of the project, with clears views on what to improve and how. As others have indicated in the original thread, the Foundation Board is not a technical body, it is a legal/financial/policymaking entity. We can express a vision (as I did in my message and blog post, for example) and communicate with teams (ex: the release team) individuals to encourage the adoption of that vision, but apart from, say, sponsoring hackfests for competent parties interested in making it happen, the board can't do much. And even if it _was_ part of its mission to oversee technical direction, as things stand it wouldn't happen because there's already way too many legal/financial/etc. tasks in the backlog that the board needs to solve before getting down to technical matters. Your vision of managers is one that would work in a corporate setting with project/team managers that get to decide what people do on a day to day basis. It doesn't work that way in a community, we're not people's bosses. Allocating (financial) resources beyond supporting events doesn't magically solve things. Unless we had a multi-million dollars budget to hire full-time hackers like the Linux Foundation, that is ;) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to the candidates (what is a complete desktop?)
Hi Erick, This is such a large question, and possibly a fairly technical one, I'm not sure it is within the scope of board candidates to debate this. Unless you clearly define what you mean by complete, fully integrated desktop environment… as everyone is going to have a different opinion on what that means. Besides, plenty of people are going to disagree and say that Free desktops like GNOME are already technically better (or equal to) OS X (or Windows) and inherently better by definition of being different and Free. On a UX level, some people can't stand using Windows or OS X after seeing what GNOME has to offer (ie: using other platforms then feels like stepping back ten years and swimming through molasse). Not to say that our app ecosystem is perfect. We have yet to have something to counter the infamous Creative Suite on a professional level when it comes to video/multimedia (non-linear and/or node-based video and audio editors and compositors come to mind). But hey, part of that puzzle is just something I've been working on for a decade! Besides the multimedia-specific area above, make GNOME a creativity workhorse platform is the global goal we should be aiming for. And by that, I include stuff like mindmapping, annotating documents (with easily typed or handwritten notes in PDF or ODF documents for example) or filling dynamic PDF forms. By the way, LibreOffice is making fantastic progress lately. I can really feel the improvements with each release (couldn't say that from its predecessor), and it seems that we will soon have something very solid on the office productivity front. Additionally, LibLibreOffice (semi-official nickname?) could be an interesting opportunity for developing a LibreOffice-based GNOME Office Suite as a simplified set of frontends (think: alternative to Apple iWork), providing a more GNOMEish UX for simpler everyday office work needs (closer to the simplicity of Google Documents, for example). There has to be a significant amount of interest in the community for people to step up and do that work though. Personally, I want our desktop to have incredible performance and be *solid as a mountain's bedrock*. The core/shell experience must not ever slow down or freeze. It must gracefully handle driver bugs, apps deployments and upgrades, and system resources (we need watchdogs, everywhere). I've lost count of the times I had to hard-reset my system (or quickly kill things through SSH, with some luck) because of some random pointer grab deadlock, because of a network IO deadlock preventing my mail client from exiting, because the system can't cope with a browser having too many tabs open, opening too big of an image in EOG (which kills the X server!), opening too many images in GIMP without shutting down my web browser first, etc. We can do better. There's lots of work to do in this area, but it's a vast metaproject to undertake and it will take a concerted effort (ie: making one or two GNOME release cycles all about performance, or some desktop-wide performance reliability hackfests, maybe). In theory, the browser story is probably best solved by the combination of sandboxing with improvements to Epiphany (aka Web). Epiphany is our window into the biggest information application market out there, the World Wide Web; it needs to have a much better UX and performance for handling tons of active and inactive tabs, and transient information in general, such as a way to painlessly manage reading lists and bookmarks. You'd be shocked if you saw how many (groups of) tabs I have stashed in Firefox's Panorama feature. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to the candidates (what is a complete desktop?)
There's some comments inline. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 12:36 AM, Jeff Fortin Tam nekoh...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Erick, This is such a large question, and possibly a fairly technical one, I'm not sure it is within the scope of board candidates to debate this. I'm not asking you to be technical, but to be managers. (Not saying here that manager can/should/must be non-technical) Unless you clearly define what you mean by complete, fully integrated desktop environment… as everyone is going to have a different opinion on what that means. Besides, plenty of people are going to disagree and say that Free desktops like GNOME are already technically better (or equal to) OS X (or Windows) and inherently better by definition of being different and Free. On a UX level, some people can't stand using Windows or OS X after seeing what GNOME has to offer (ie: using other platforms then feels like stepping back ten years and swimming through molasse). I'm talking from the point of view of the user. A simple user needs a desktop environment in which fulfills his daily tasks. And clearly, GNOME is lacking here in some areas like: integration between modules, some basic applications a modern desktop provide, performance, etc. For instance, Allan recently made a call on GNOME to complete a small number of core applications, which are a bit far away of what we as a community has. That's what I'm asking. Being a director of the board for me, means having the power to allocate resources to make GNOME better, gather the community consensus and improve HDPi support the way we did once, for instance. Not to say that our app ecosystem is perfect. We have yet to have something to counter the infamous Creative Suite on a professional level when it comes to video/multimedia (non-linear and/or node-based video and audio editors and compositors come to mind). But hey, part of that puzzle is just something I've been working on for a decade! Besides the multimedia-specific area above, make GNOME a creativity workhorse platform is the global goal we should be aiming for. And by that, I include stuff like mindmapping, annotating documents (with easily typed or handwritten notes in PDF or ODF documents for example) or filling dynamic PDF forms. By the way, LibreOffice is making fantastic progress lately. I can really feel the improvements with each release (couldn't say that from its predecessor), and it seems that we will soon have something very solid on the office productivity front. Additionally, LibLibreOffice (semi-official nickname?) could be an interesting opportunity for developing a LibreOffice-based GNOME Office Suite as a simplified set of frontends (think: alternative to Apple iWork), providing a more GNOMEish UX for simpler everyday office work needs (closer to the simplicity of Google Documents, for example). There has to be a significant amount of interest in the community for people to step up and do that work though. Personally, I want our desktop to have incredible performance and be *solid as a mountain's bedrock*. The core/shell experience must not ever slow down or freeze. It must gracefully handle driver bugs, apps deployments and upgrades, and system resources (we need watchdogs, everywhere). I've lost count of the times I had to hard-reset my system (or quickly kill things through SSH, with some luck) because of some random pointer grab deadlock, because of a network IO deadlock preventing my mail client from exiting, because the system can't cope with a browser having too many tabs open, opening too big of an image in EOG (which kills the X server!), opening too many images in GIMP without shutting down my web browser first, etc. We can do better. There's lots of work to do in this area, but it's a vast metaproject to undertake and it will take a concerted effort (ie: making one or two GNOME release cycles all about performance, or some desktop-wide performance reliability hackfests, maybe). So far, you've tell me what you want, not how to accomplish it. And I know, we as community provide a huge pools of ideas and discussion, but I would love to know how each candidate thinks about it. I would like a board of directors to be strong leaders of the project, with clears views on what to improve and how. In theory, the browser story is probably best solved by the combination of sandboxing with improvements to Epiphany (aka Web). Epiphany is our window into the biggest information application market out there, the World Wide Web; it needs to have a much better UX and performance for handling tons of active and inactive tabs, and transient information in general, such as a way to painlessly manage reading lists and bookmarks. You'd be shocked if you saw how many (groups of) tabs I have stashed in Firefox's Panorama feature. This is one the things I've noticed, we've been trying to solve the tabs problems of Web for some cycles now. That's basic
