I had the pleasure to attend the DesktopSummit 2011, a great event that happened in Berlin from 5-12 of August 2011.
As I've mentioned in an earlier blogpost my focus was to highlight Enlightenment's opinion that
performance matters and that we need
broader standards in freedesktop.org. Of course I explained a bit about our history and the current status of E17. The presentation file can be
downloaded here.
All in all the event was great, not just due the talks but mostly due the
friends and side-talks. Being at these events for a few years I managed to know lots of people from different projects. Not being in a major side (read: KDE or GNOME) I have the gift of free-transit among these fields... which is pleasant as I can gather ideas from both.
[There is no hard or official barriers between them, but the psychological blocks peers from talking to each other and this is quite bad]
I came there sponsored by my company (
ProFUSION embedded systems) to represent the system that provides a big bucket of our consulting, training and development services:
Enlightenment. I had the pleasure to engage into endless conversations with Enlightenment developers and community leaders (Cedric, Boris, Michael, Philippe...) We discussed a lot how we could broader EFL usage, bring more users, lower the barrier to new developers with easier to use tools and languages and of course how we could get Raster to release E17.
I also tried to learn from other people of technologies as well. Before I was an Enlightenment hacker I did use and develop with
Qt/KDE and already knew some icons such as Aaron Seigo, Thiago Macieira, Helio Castro and Sebastian Kügler, which I managed to meet again. Of course my ex-coworkers at INdT and KDE fanatics Artur Duque de Souza, Renato Chencarek were there. And I was introduced to Daker Fernandes Pinheiro, from INdT. We discussed QML, Qt, MeeGo and lots of optimization and API designs. Quite productive!
Being part of Maemo since 2006, attended some GUADEC and hacked
Gtk/GNOME for fun and work I got to know some icons there as well. I've talked to Lennart Poettering, Marcel Holtmann and Marc-André Lueau, people that I've worked together in a way or another and that are always open minded to discussions. I've also touched base with some people like Lucas Rocha and Zeeshan Ali. It is interesting to know what these guys are doing for Linux Desktop (and mobile) infrastructure and their vision for GNOME.
My presentation went quite well, I was bit anxious and nervous in such a huge room that held it, but I guess people understood the history of Enlightenment, why we created the "Foundation Libraries" (instead of using Gtk or Qt), our special care with performance and why it will always pay off. I did some heavy critics to FreeDesktop.Org that generated positive feedback from Thiago Macieira (Qt/KDE) and people from other desktops (XFCE/LXDE). Last but not least I've made it clear Enlightenment has serious problems to manage community,
we're quite bully, and did thank the guys like Philippe Caseiro and other french dudes that are trying to solve this issue.
All in all a great event, with great people! Looking forward to be in next desktopsummit as well!