Day 2 was the last day at the conference. We woke around 0700 again, which is pretty early for me. I struggled to get ready and grab a bite of breakfast before running into the bus that would drive us to the venue.
Initially, the second day was to host pre-planned sessions. This proceeded until lunch, after which everyone unanimously decided to make it a barcamp style session again. I didn’t have a talk on this day. Both my sessions had finished on day 1. On the second day, I was going to run around and attend sessions!
I sat in Praveen’s RPM packaging session to start with. Quite a few people had turned up. However, a majority of them weren’t fedora users, so the packaging bit was going a little over their heads. Uhm, a lot over their heads actually. Praveen finished in 20 minutes. The time alotted to him was an hour! Christoph was to take a session on advanced packaging, but he was still working on his slides. I filled in for a bit, and gave the audience a very very very high level summary of packaging. For instance, while explaining the spec file, I blah-blahed most of the parts. I just explained what goes on, without going into any specifics at all. They appeared to absorb some of it.
I finished up and ran to level 2 to attend Aditya’s talk on puppet.(He’s uploaded the slides here) I had attended an IRC session Aditya had taken on puppet a while back: everyone other than me had gotten puppet to work. So, I wanted to attend this second session in the hopes of getting it to work. During the talk however, I realized that puppet isn’t a lot of use for non sys admin users. I mean, I don’t need puppet to control my 3 or even 4 systems. It doesn’t quite make sense to take the trouble. It’s my opinion really. One might choose to use puppet even for two systems. I recorded the session. If you’re interested, you can see it here at archive.org.
After puppet, I ran to attend the session on oVirt that “wariola” was taking. Again, a video is available here at archive.org. It was a most interesting talk. There was a lot of cool stuff that he showed. I’ll nudge him for the presentations and put them up someplace.
This was followed by a quiet lunch.
The post lunch program was re-planned into barcamp format. So, we had pitches and voting. The first session was on some “User issues with gnome3” or something. I sat there and listened. Personally, I felt the session was a huge waste. It was like one of those rants and crib sessions where one just keeps on pointing out his problems and follows them up with “someone should do this, I’d like that”. Well, you only get your solutions when that “someone” is you. Talking about it, and making jokes to an audience, ninety percent of which have never used Fedora isn’t going to do anything. I didn’t speak at all during the session. I kept quiet. I’ve learnt to not participate in such debates. I shan’t say anymore about it.
I walked out of the above mentioned session and went back to the main auditorium for Izhar’s talk on LXC. I’ve uploaded a video of this too at archive.org. He was clearly unprepared for it. With all the organizing he was running around doing, no one really pestered him for not having slides etc. π
Post tea break, we had the keynote. I’ve put up whatever bits and pieces of it that I recorded. Abu Mansur put forward some really interesting opinions and thoughts. It was a good keynote. I’m glad I attended it.
Two Samsung galaxy tabs were given out in a lottery after this. I didn’t get any :(. However, both winners were from the organization team. Christoph correctly remarked that each person in the organization team would’ve been given one if we could afford it. Photo sessions followed. Team photos, and the FUDCon collective photo were taken. Folks had to leave already, and the parting began. It’s a part of life really, and I’m used to it. I still wished the conference would last longer and that more folks had made it really. Anyway, no one cried π
Back to the hotel, food, drinks, bed. The next morning Yogi and Dean escorted us to the train station where the train would take us to the LCCT. Flew home. The.. end.
take note that the speaker of the gnome session, khairil yusof, was one of the contributors for freebsd gnome packages .. and he still contributing to gnome design/usability stuff once a while though couldnt be as active as he was before due to our dayjob thats focusing on plone is consuming a lot of our time ..
his session is more of a design/usability problem highlights and how fedora and gnome could do better for the users, of which he hope someone would pick up some of the ideas, as he himself could not do it.
I know Izhar. I had looked him up during the talk π
The talk would’ve been constructive if it were at a proper developers conference, maybe one like gnome asia where there was a chance of some solutions coming up. Taking that session at a conference where the majority of the audience was going to be students, most of which had _never_ used Fedora was a bad idea IMHO. The idea of FUDCon is to encourage more folks to use Fedora/Linux. This session didn’t help.
I’m not saying that the session shouldn’t have happened. I just think it should’ve happened some place else. It isn’t enough to take a session at a conference. One needs to plan it, and planning means that one should be aware of what audience the talk is directed at. For instance, the LXC session you took was for dummies, because the audience is completely new. Had you talked about advanced stuff, it would’ve been a waste too, wouldn’t it? π
My intention is not to offend anyone. I’m really sorry if I did. I’m just saying that even complaining needs to be directed at the correct people. Attendees of the FUDCon going out and saying,”we attended a talk where this person showed us sooo many issues with Fedora” is a huge loss to us. It almost negates all the positives that we showed them in the other sessions π¦
well .. FUDCon is Fedora User Developer Conference .. and not plain user conference .. granted that most our attendees at this point of time are mainly users, though we also have plenty of contributors around .. of which
as for LXC .. i was planning to go more advanced π , just that not prepared .. π ..
and imo, being honest with our problems, is the first step towards being better .. whenever i promote Fedora, i do explain to them what are the shortcomings .. and if they are not willing with the shortcomings, i suggest other distros which fit them better ..
I also found out from experience, people who start using despite the shortcomings, are more likely to remain compared to people who started using because of beautiful words, but frustrated after discovering things doesn’t work for them ..
s/… of which/.. of which might be able to bring this somewhere/
“and imo, being honest with our problems, is the first step towards being better .. whenever i promote Fedora, i do explain to them what are the shortcomings .. and if they are not willing with the shortcomings, i suggest other distros which fit them better ..”
I understand that. However, the problems aired in the session were not known bugs or global issues. They were the speaker’s private opinions, a personal “nice to have” list. For instance, the issue about syncing data over multiple machines isn’t anything that my friends or me come across. N number of services that let you do this are available: Dropbox is an example. I was at a loss on how this became a gnome/fedora issue.
Even though FUDCon is a users _and_ developers conference, the participant list showed that the main audience was going to be users (not even fedora users, just users). You have to change your talk accordingly. You can’t continue with a mega advanced talk that just makes folks think of the project as “very complicated, not for me”. That’s not what we want. We’re working hard on making fedora more user friendly.
I agree that users who continue to use fedora being mindful of the short comings stick around longer, in general. However, the issues aired, like I’ve already mentioned, are not really issues. These were the speakers personal “nice to have list”. They don’t apply to me. I like gnome3, all of it really :). I’ve already pointed out that the audience agreed because they were being _shown_ stuff. Had they been using Fedora, I expect that quite a few of them would have reacted differently.
dropbox only provide sync for files and folders …
what he raised in his talk was not about files, he also mention its easier to just use dropbox … whats missing, and can be done better (and be ahead of other OS) is metadata (tags, categorization, rating, etc) .. that part is still missing π
yes in one sense that can be called as “nice to have”.. though imo, this is one of the things that can push linux desktop further in front, ahead of other OSes (not just other distros) .. ‘Features’ & ‘First’
I wanted to code for that .. though at the moment we have to focus on Plone, as our survival depends on it .. (p/s: We think the metadata trick can be done by using Plone as the central server .. . however performance can be an issue, and anybody know where they hide the documentation on how to integrate gnome-document with external services?)
“what he raised in his talk was not about files, he also mention its easier to just use dropbox β¦ whats missing, and can be done better (and be ahead of other OS) is metadata (tags, categorization, rating, etc) .. that part is still missing :-)”
You can just select the user configuration directories in Dropbox. They’ll get synced too. For instance, shotwell stores my tags and ratings in ~/.shotwell. I sync that directory, problem solved. π What is the problem here? π
On documentation on gnome-documents. I’m sure you can mail the gnome-love list, and someone will get back to you. Gnome3, as you’ll know, is moving really quickly at the moment. They’re concentrating on the fixes and new features. The documentation will also come.
The issues being outlined are basically saying “lets shift to web based applications rather than working on the desktop”. You can always do that using google-docs and other services. Gnome setting up a server to provide online services to all its users doesn’t sound good to me.
“You can just select the user configuration directories in Dropbox. Theyβll get synced too. For instance, shotwell stores my tags and ratings in ~/.shotwell. I sync that directory, problem solved. π What is the problem here? :P”
thats not exactly user friendly aint it π … unless ure a dev or someone who have used linux for quite a while, you wouldnt event know that ~/.shotwell exist π
these are the kind of little things that makes a big difference in user experience.
and not to mention, not all apps stores metadata this way .. evolution for example is useless if you only sync ~/.evolution without ensuring the gconf stuff are also extracted out ..
there are no defined freedesktop standard for this neither – on how to make your app sync-able across systems without issues .. everyone stores their stuff differently, some in ~/ some in ~/.local , the worst are those who stores in multiple places, and breaks if one is missing .. /me stares at evolution
“Gnome setting up a server to provide online services to all its users doesnβt sound good to me.”
not gnome setting up the servers π he didn’t suggest that
but rather, have freedesktop defining a standard for such sync features π .. and some example implementation and server .. there’s one promising route called the socialdesktop/opencollaborationservices by KDE .. but it need love ..