Transparency Report: Steven Deobald, GNOME Executive Director

[j0rge]

I have calls with important people sometimes, so I am reporting these in the interest of transparency. This was planned to be a 30 minute call … we ended up talking for 2.5 hours!

Our relationship with GNOME is important. I’ve been a user since October GNOME and I have also briefly served on the Foundation board back in the day.

Here are the main themes we discussed:

Economics

Working on OSS a little bit here and there is fun, but people grinding and not getting paid sucks. We should fix that. There should be a career path for the desktop. Generally speaking we need to fix the loop of end users being able to pay developers. I communicated as to why I’m excited about bazaar. This video is making the rounds!

Bazzite is about to CHANGE (for the better)

We just need to take the W

Linux is everywhere, there’s places where Linux desktop can be epic - we just need to get together more and take the W, we need to be better closers.

Better Collaboration and Friendship

The end user discourse around different foundations and projects sucks - much of this is like the usual old school arguments. Projects should work together better as an example for the user base.

Flathub and Flatpak

I brought up lots of places where we can be working together around flatpak and flathub - we’re pretty fiercely aligned here and would love to work together more on getting attention to the parts of the stack that need help. Bringing flatpak’s tech into cloud native will take work but it’s totally doable, we just need the resources. This is an area where I feel we could really make a difference in getting the word out, expect more from me on this in the future.

Other things

Marketing, social, all of those things we could be working on together. I made a wallpaper request, but it’s secret - if they ever do it, I’ll let you know!

Jorge’s Take

I’m pretty stoked, he understands the vastness of cloud native and how GNOME can take advantage of this energy. We align on just about everything, and it’s nice to know there’s an executive out there fighting for the future of the linux desktop, with the polish we need to fundraise and get everyone the resources they need to make the desktop better.

He’s already synced with the new FPL, Jef Spaleta. I’ll be meeting him soon so expect that report sometime in the future.

[Matt_Hartley]

Gardiner is awesome and pretty direct in his feedback. If something rocks, he is honest about it.

[steven]

:wav: Hey dudes. Thanks for the chat, Jorge! Was fun… we’ll have to block a little more time for ourselves on the next call.

important people

ha!

Perfect timing for Bazaar, btw… since Canonical is giving up on bzr the name’s all yours!

[j0rge]

@steven

Perfect timing for Bazaar, btw… since Canonical is giving up on bzr the name’s all yours!

Some great folks on that team! Thanks for dropping by Steven!

[Matt_Hartley]

Great to see you here, Steven!

[werner]

This is weird, I see a complete interview (I suppose?) In my Feed reader, but the link goes toward this page.

KDE Plasma has the ability to search for an app and directly install it, btw

[mandarinoo]

I‘ve also been doing that all the time on Gnome? Frankly, I‘m a bit confused here.

[Xariann]

I really hope this takes off, and I will go test Bazaar and make donations to the developer.

But if I may…

You mentioned marketing and social – if you are trying to attract new users to Linux, some of the dev responses on Reddit are aggressive.

It wasn’t directed at me, but seeing one of the Devs telling someone it’s “user error” because they didn’t know where to find the documentation is not welcoming and almost made me want to uninstall the distro.

Some people WILL Google for stuff only to be defeated by a solution that doesn’t work on an immutable distro, so they think they have done the research and will go to Reddit.

Bazzite is FANTASTIC, your community efforts are FANTASTIC, but talking down to people who are learning an entirely new ecosystem is not helpful. So yes, on the social front, that’s one place where there could be improvement.

I put training materials together as a job, if one of my users doesn’t know where to find the materials or my instructions are not clear to them, maybe I didn’t provide that information where they are most likely to look, or my information wasn’t clear enough. If I told them all it’s their error, just because it’s clear to me, nobody would learn anything, and they’d give up.

Take my feedback or leave it, or kick me out of the forums, but I would hope that maybe it gets listened to, and we all become a much stronger and supportive community as a result.

[Matt_Wilkie]

^^this^^
It’s been 2 decades since I spent real time with Fedora, and most of my computing world has been Windows-land. Some of the “how do I…” and “where do I read…” questions were bounced in the manner described. I’m predisposed to like Bazzite and Bluefin so I weathered those encounters and kept going, many others won’t.

…they think they have done the research and will go to Reddit.

Yep. It’s the internet, there is no front door. It’s impossible to know what path a person travelled and what they have and haven’t been exposed to so far.

Above small complaint aside, I’m very happy with my sojourn into immutable distro land, and hope it continues to grow healthily.

[j0rge]

Discussed with some folks, understood, we’ll work on it, thanks!

[kylegospo]

You’re not gonna be kicked out for voicing your opinion.

I’m the one that made that comment, that was not intended as a jab to the poster, but rather a statement to everyone else in what had become a popular thread. The title claimed it was a distro issue and I wanted it to be clear it was simple user error and we handle that use case gracefully. It’s for that reason I said that last after linking to the relevant documentation and restating the solution.

I will take your feedback into consideration for the future. Thank you.

[Xariann]

Thank you both for your response.

Yes, I can see that viewpoint too, given that a lot of work has been put into making Bazzite work out of the box.

I just convinced my other half to try it today, they had a terrible experience with Linux prior to Bazzite.

They absolutely LOVE Bazzite though.

Thanks for all the hard work.