GNOME.Asia Summit 2014

This was my first time to attend GNOME.Asia summit and it was very exciting and interesting! I am a user of GNOME and Fedora since GNOME 3.0 and Fedora 15 was released, and I make contribution to GNOME since I started working on Google Summer of Code 2013 project last year. It was a great chance (also my first chance) to meet people who make these great work, know what other people are working on, and share what I have done in the last year.

Keynotes of these two days were great. Both GNOME and Fedora are being improved. There are always interesting things in the new versions. Systemd is also a great work. It eases the work needed to configure and track a GNU/Linux system. We can also expects many useless difference between distributions can finally be eliminated using systemd, which is also a goal of systemd, mentioned in the talk by Lennart. Both GNOME 3 and systemd make a big change to what we originally have, and make things easier to newcomers. I think the only bad thing is that systemd will make GNU/Linux and *BSD become more different. [1]

RMS talked about why we should only use free software. Free software are great. I have modified several free software to meet my personal need, and I also share modification with other people by making packages for those software modified by me. Although it is not possible for me to stop all use of non-free software now, more than 99% packages installed on my system are free. [2]

Input methods and Wayland are great. GNOME on wayland works smoother than X, and software using X works very well. The most surprising thing is that users cannot notice some programs are actually using X. Input methods are essential parts of the system, at least for people who have to input Chinese everyday. [3] Input methods should never crash. They want to move some simple and stable input methods back to the IBus main process in order to make input methods switching faster. I would like to see this feature because the switching is much slower on IBus than on SCIM or Fcitx However, the input method I used, ibus-chewing, is not very simple, and it may not be put back into the main process.

Another interesting thing is that there are other people creating new desktop environments based on GNOME softwares, libraries, and design. BlankOn and Deepin are such projects. Although creating new desktop is not the main goal of these projects, they already create a new and different desktop as the result of work.

Thank GNOME foundation for sponsoring me to attend GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 this year. Thank all volunteers and other speakers for making this great event. Thank people who invited me to attend this event, and I was very surprised when I received the invitation message. Although combining two different topics, archive integration and FreeBSD porting, in one talk causes the talk became too long, knowing that there are people who like my archive integration work was still exciting. However, I don'y have time to complete the work now because I have to finish my final projects and final exams first. I hope I can complete the archive integration work and make it available in core GNOME applications in this summer. [4]

Links:

1. GNOME.Asia Summit 2014
2. Speakers Info
3. Speakers Slides
4. Pictures on flickr
5. Day 1 video on youku
6. Day 2 video on youku

Below are some not-so-related things:

1. This may make the work of keeping applications work on both GNU/Linux and *BSD more difficult.
2. I am glad to replace non-free software with a free software if the free software implementation also works well.
3. This was why the IBus integration is very controversial in when GNOME 3.6 was released. It was also why I temporarily switched to Xfce until I upgraded my system to Fedora 19 with GNOME 3.8.
4. This was why I didn't apply for Google Summer of Code 2014 this year. I think I should finish existing work first.
5. This was the first time I met so many people from different countries, and this was also the first time for me to talk and discuss with other people using English. This was the first time that I made an English speech. This was the first time I went to China and the Great Wall.
6. Although systemd and wayland are great, I still hope systemd and wayland will always be optional dependencies of GNOME. Systemd APIs are currently not implemented on most non-Linux systems. Wayland is also currently not available on non-Linux systems although it is possible to port it to other systems.
7. Some people wonder why there is a talk related to FreeBSD porting. They think running GNOME on FreeBSD is always an easy task. I guess they didn't know FreeBSD ports still only have GNOME 2.32 before I told them.
8. No one know when the welcome party in the day 0 started. 
9. Tea break without tea! Only water.
10. I still don't know why I cannot connect to http://2014.gnome.asia/. To prevent my connection being refused, I use ssh as a SOCKS proxy server and use proxychains to force the browser using proxy to connect to GNOME.Asia website.