I gave my talk about Ubuntu Desktop Technologies at OSCON, and the slides are all online. You can get the source here or follow the pretty picture bellow to get to the binaries:

Ubuntu Desktop Technologies slides, title slide

Overall the talk was well received. Many people liked the slides especially, and I loved being able to say that they were both done and Inkscape, and use features that Illustrator doesn't support.

A comment that Miguel made is that I should have called it "GNOME Desktop Technologies" instead of "Ubuntu Desktop Technologies." He followed that with "perhaps I should only talk about Mono on SuSE." While it makes me laugh to think how many people would be happy with him doing that, he does make a good point. There are a few reasons that I titled the talk the way that I did:

  • One of the technologies that I highlighted is Telepathy which isn't yet a GNOME technology. I hope that it will be soon, but it currently isn't.
  • I also talked about DBus which is more of a GNOME dependency rather than a GNOME technology.
  • The number of people that come up to me, want to help with Ubuntu and are surprised when I mention they could work on GNOME. No seriously.
  • The talk was originally scheduled for Ubuntu Live, and then migrated to OSCON.

The third point there always befuddles me. But I'm learning to deal with it. Since the talk was targeted to new users and developers, I wanted to draw as many of them as I possibly could. Using the "Ubuntu" name seems to do that better than the "GNOME" name today, for better or worse. A new contributor is a good thing no matter what project name draws them in. As Ubuntu, we need to always ensure that we continue to inform people of our roots even though they seem plainly obvious to us.


posted Jul 30, 2008 | permanent link