Vincent (not me, but the other Vincent) improved a bit the performance of gnome-system-log lately. As he's not on the planet, I thought it would be nice to share his results with more people. He's measuring the launching time when opening a 2.9MB log.
| Release | 2.12.2 | 2.13.1 | cvs - Nov 5 | cvs - Nov 8 |
| Launching time | 43s | 5.7s | 2.9s | 2.1s |
Vincent: I'll buy you something to drink once you're back in France :-)
[18:08] | [GNOME] | [#339] | [one comment]
Jeff: I don't think I wrote that with fewer people on the board, "maybe we'll see the end of the popularity contest at the next elections"
;-) While I think the size reduction might help to stop the popularity contest, the most important thing to me is that we're having a real, sane, open debate about this. Why is it important?
It's the members who make the Foundation live, and it seems we're making progress here: I would really love to see so many mails on foundation-list each month. Having members caring about the Foundation is important, and I hope this also means the next elections will be more than a popularity contest.
For the note, I totally agree that the diversity of the community should be represented in the Foundation. I'd love to see the board represent this diversity, but unfortunately elections results might not allow this... We might need to think of other ways of doing it.
Daniel: it seems a lot of (french) people wonder how to vote blank for the referendum. It's possible: log in on the voting page and click next without selecting "yes" or "no". You're done.
But do not vote blank, vote yes :-)
So, the voting period of the Reducing Board Size Referendum finally started yesterday. This was more difficult than expected since some tools were not totally ready and we had a lot of membership applications, but we managed to do it. Just a bit late :-) I think the web interface for voting is a huge improvement over the previous email one. I just hope I didn't leave any bugs there. Well, we'll see in a few days, I suppose. Many thanks to the sysadmins for their really useful help, especially Ross and Toni.
I'm glad to see so much debate about the referendum on foundation-list. I hope members will stay involved in the Foundation like this after the referendum and the elections. With such a debate, it seems some people (including I) will expect a lot from the next board, especially delegating a lot of work.
I have voted for "YES". Glynn and Luis nicely explain why I think this is the right choice. And maybe we'll see the end of the popularity contest at the next elections.
In other news, GNOME 2.13.1 was released today. This is the first release of the new 2.13.x development cycle. Thanks to Dom and Caleb for being reactive and releasing lots of librsvg tarballs :-) There are already some nice proposed modules for inclusion in the Desktop, and with the work being done on performance, GNOME 2.14 is going to be the best Desktop out there.
And you know what? Everyone can help make GNOME 2.14 rock. There are a lot of ways to help and I'll post something about this later. Share the love!
Also, I kick Jeff ;-)
One of the things we discuss with Dave at the JDLL was Making GNOME fun for users
. As Thomas points out, we held a discussion about this yesterday on #marketing. Here's a quick summary of what I think: GNOME is great, it just works, users like it, but users don't get passionate about it. And this isn't right.
So, let's take a look at where we are now. We have an easy-to-use free desktop with lots of really good points (accessible, localized, etc.). There are some areas where we could be better, but some people are working on it (documentation and performance come to my mind). So GNOME will be even better in the near future. People will like it. They will use it. But they won't get excited about it. We get excited about it, but our users are not. They're satisfied with GNOME, but that's all. Nothing more. I believe we should do our best to change that. Making GNOME fun for the users would definitely help for this.
The killing Wanda
discussion was interesting. I for one think we should keep her. There's the argument of where we come from
, but this is not the main reason why I think so. Let me say it straight: Wanda is totally useless, and that's why we should keep her. When people try Wanda, they wonder why it even exists, why we took the time to include it, why it is so useless. But most people also smile while doing this. They're having a good time while trying it. We should keep Wanda, if only for this. This is something that make some users love the desktop, and not just like it.
A friend of mine showed me Steve Jobs' latest keynote. One thing struck me, and it was not the new products that were announced. What struck me is PhotoBooth: this is a small application, used to take photos with the videocam integrated in the new iMac G5. The way the application was introduced is brilliant: it's just an application you can use to take photo of you making some weird faces. And everyone was laughing when he presented it. Everyone will love this application, although nearly nobody will really use it.
Thomas is right: we need themes that people love. But we also need fun applications. I don't know how we can handle this, since right now, the GNOME modulesets does not really include applications that are fun, but applications that are useful. For example, Monkey Bubble was a great game but it was not included in GNOME 2.6. Creating a new moduleset for such applications would be a solution, but I'm not sure it goes well with the idea of a GNOME Certification. I don't think we can say to the user looking for something fun go on GNOME files and search there
, because what's important here is to include some fun things by default.
We need GNOME to do more than its job. We need GNOME to be fun for users.
[13:37] | [GNOME] | [#328] | [5 comments] | [one trackback]
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