Desktop Summit 2011 - Back!

The Desktop Summit is finished for me, though it continues on with workshop and BoFs.

Berlin's weather is pretty much like Dublin's with regard to the sky colour and rain status; though maybe with a few more degrees :) I quite enjoyed the conference, very happy to meet again the friends I made last year as well as meeting up with new interesting people (btw, if you asked about my card, it was made at moo.com: get yours now!!). It was also great to meet a couple of cool people whose activities I follow online, though I'd like to find a way to introduce myself to someone I know who doesn't know me in a perhaps less creepy way :o) (Sorry people, it was still a pleasure!)

I found less elation in the technical talks this year than last, perhaps because it's difficult to beat the excitement of seeing Gnome 3 work for the first time, pre-release. The ones I attended were still interesting and hinted at all the solid work that is going on currently, and I really enjoyed the many discussions on outreach, collaboration between the projects and within projects, and all that goodness. The Gnome State of the Union talk was a hoot, and one of the highlights for me was when they showed a list of quotes from unhappy users, like "if they treat their users like idiots, they should expect idiots as users" (or something like this), etc., as we're seeing online at the moment. It turned out these quotes were about the Gnome 2.0 release, and this makes me hopeful once the dust settles down, people will look at Gnome 3 with less of a knee-jerk reaction (and might still decide it's not for them, of course).

I will try to put together my notes into a few posts, though I can guarantee I won't have the time to be as thorough (or long-winded, depending on the point of view!) as in my notes for EuroPython unless I get the flu or something.

Many thanks to the organisers for putting together the conference and parties, I had a great time -- s'y'all next year!

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