Spring Season 2013

I haven’t written a blogpost for a while. It was mainly because I was too busy with all the events I organized or attended in the last three months. So here is a little recap:

• Feb 23-24 – DevConf.cz 2013 - this is an event that took weeks of my life. I was the head of the organizing team and we went really large this year. There were almost 100 talks, workshops and sessions. We counted around 700 attendees and we haven’t had any significant problems, so success.
• March 2-3 – InstallFest 2013 – this is a traditional Linux event at Strahov campus of CVUT. Strahov has always played an important role in the Czech Internet and it’s called Silicon Hill. It has a strong Linux community. I delivered a talk on where Fedora is heading.
• April 10 – Afternoon with Red Hat in Bratislava – a set of talks introducing Red Hat and its open source projects and technologies to university students. We talked on Fedora, ABRT, openJDK, and MRG.
• April 15 – Afternoon with Red Hat in Prague – the same event as in Bratislava, just talks were different: Fedora QA, Ceylon language, and QML.
• April 17 – Red Hat Open House – another “day of open doors” in Brno offices of Red Hat. There were a lot of talks, programming contests, we held a F19 power management test day whose room was full all the time. I delivered two talks on RHT programs for students, community activities etc.
• April 22 – Afternoon with Red Hat in Ceske Budejovice – it was our first time in this city and we were surprised how many students came and how interested they were. We talked on Fedora, Fedora on ARM, JBoss, OpenShift, and Modern Linux Desktop. It was probably the only Czech university which has a lecture room with RHEL (not CentOS).
• April 23 – Presentation of Red Hat Thesis Topics at FIT BUT – we prepared another set of thesis topics for the next school year. Students can work on open source projects with us. At this event, we showed student what they could work on and tried to answer all their questions. BTW we have a new thesis management system, check it out
• April 24 – Presentation of Red Hat Thesis Topics at FI MUNI – the same event, just different Brno university.
• April 25 – Red Hat Presentation in Bratislava – another event in Bratislava, in fact just one building away, a different faculty. I talked on RHT programs for students and community activities.
• May 7 – Day of Industrial Partners at FI MUNI – career fair kind of event, we had a short presentation of Red Hat and then we were answering students’ questions about Red Hat.

And it’s not the end. On Monday, I’m going to EurOpen to talk on the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. And on May 21st, I’m going to LinuxTag 2013, probably the biggest Linux event in Europe. Life never stops

Fedora: Giving Up Product?

There is an interesting discussion going on in the Fedora Board and it gathers a lot of ideas. Some of them also say that we should give up defaults, or Fedora as an end product. I opposes such a direction and here is why:

Giving Up Defaults

Giving up defaults means giving up Linux newbies because it’d lead to the situation I call “new restaurant experience”. You go to a restaurant you’ve never been to and they give you an endless menu with tens of items usually strangely named. All you know is that you want a good meal, but you’re lost because you have no experience with the cuisine, you know almost nothing about the meals (except for ingredients) and you still need to choose something. Then the waiter comes to your rescue: “What meat do you like? Beef? Great, we’ve got this great meal with beef. You’ll love it! Would you like to give it a try?”, “Sure I would!” Or he could just say: “Beef? Great, we’ve got a huge selection of meals with beef, here see the section Beef.”  Would it help you? I can say it wouldn’t help me and when I’m in an unfamiliar location, I’m looking for restaurants that have simpler menus and predictable meals just to avoid such situations.

It works the same way with software. When my friend gave me a CD with Knoppix, I saw that Linux was quite nice on the desktop and I decided to give it a try. Knoppix was just a live distro, so I was looking for some more solid distribution. All I knew was that I wanted Linux for desktop. Someone told me that Mandrake was the best option for desktop and I went for it. I was glad that they had defaults (environment, apps,…) because I could not possibly make a qualified decision since I knew very little about Linux, and I trusted Mandrake that they chose a good selection for me. Mandrake’s default environment was KDE and I was satisfied with it enough to stick with Linux. After some time, when I was settled, I explored other options and found GNOME a better option for me. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate KDE as the default option at the beginning. It helped me.

Having defaults is about guiding. You tell newbies what you think is the best experience for them and it’s usually all they want to hear. Once they get more familiar with the distro, they can explore other options and find out that there is a whole world out there. Exposing the whole selection to new, unexperienced users is not helpful, it’s discouraging. The other day, one friend of mine told me that he needed Ubuntu or Debian to install one product that is supported only on these distributions. Because he had no experience with Linux, he asked which one. Well, I told him Ubuntu because I knew that was the quickest and easiest way to his goal: having that product up and running.  Just compare ubuntu.com and debian.org. Ubuntu gives you a very easy way to download and install it while Debian reveals all the complexity right at the beginning. Great for those who know exactly what they want, otherwise simply discouraging. And Debian still has defaults.

Having defaults is about focus. If you want to make a good product, you need to focus. It’s another thing Ubuntu did right (not any more with all that tablet/TV/mobile craze). It’s better to have one solid and working solution than ten unfinished and broken ones. If you have defaults, you know what really needs to work and you can focus on that.

Having defaults is about responsibility. A distribution is a huge selection of software. Something works better, something works worse. But it’s our responsibility that what we push to users as defaults is well maintained and has some future. I’m not sure if we can tell that about all desktop environments and window managers we’d have to equally offer if we had no defaults.

I believe having defaults is very important for Fedora Project. If we should have some default selection, it should be by use cases. You want a Linux for your desktop? Here is our product for desktop. You want to run Linux in the cloud? Here is our product for cloud. I know that choosing defaults is difficult and brings long discussions. But giving it up just because it’s difficult is like hiding head in sand.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate every new desktop environment, window manager, or application that is available in Fedora repos because freedom of choice is great, but having defaults doesn’t limit this freedom.

Giving Up Product

Making Fedora just a platform for other end products goes actually far beyond giving up defaults. Fedora would lose a lot. If you don’t have your own end product, you pretty much lose a lot of your visibility and brand. “Selling” a platform to users doesn’t make any sense because users (and most developers, too) don’t care about the platform what’s behind the product. They would use e.g. GNOME OS and just a few of them would know that there is actually some Fedora behind it and even fewer of them would care. Would it help bring more contributors? I don’t know, but I guess it probably wouldn’t. People get more likely attached to the product they’re using. While I like GNOME and I’m also a GNOME Foundation member, I’d rather switch to a different environment and stay with Fedora than stay with GNOME and switch to another distribution. This kind of attachment is very important for getting people involved and contribute. Without being the product people are using, we’d lose the ability to build such an attachment.

There was actually an attempt to build just a platform upon which others can build their products – Unity Linux. And it never took off. They never attracted enough developers while Mageia, another derivative of Mandriva which is also an end product, is doing much better. I still think a distribution like Fedora is the best wrapping for what’s called a Linux system. While e.g. GNOME is the face of the system, it’s Fedora who has the expertize from the kernel up to the desktop.

Another question is if any community would be interested in building a product based on Fedora. Why wouldn’t they choose Debian at the first place? By becoming just a platform, Fedora would lose a lot, but would we get something back, someone else on board? I doubt. And OS products generated from our own community? Regarding desktops, the GNOME part of the Fedora community might able to produce a solid desktop product, maybe KDE, too. But that’s pretty much it. I don’t see any other spins that are strong enough to build and promote products on their own.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see Fedora as a great platform to build on, but I’d rather have Fedora as a great product to use and I don’t think that building a great product prevents us from being a good platform to build on. However, I’d encourage people to build things in Fedora rather than on Fedora.

And what would be my vision for Fedora?

A truly free and community general-purpose operating system that aims at people who create things and build solutions. It doesn’t matter whether they are designers, developers, admins etc.

FAm Budget and Governance Reform

We’ve entered the new fiscal year in which we’re facing a lot of changes and new things. No, I’m not talking about GNOME 4 or systemd 2 I mean changes in governance of Fedora Ambassadors. In FAmSCo, we worked on one of the biggest changes in how Fedora Ambassadors (and other contributors, too, because they’re not excluded) can spend money. But before I start explaining all the changes, let me state problems we were facing and reasons why we did the changes:

• Our spending was decreasing. It sounds like something good, but in fact, it meant that we were doing less and less activities. Financial deporting wasn’t good (it was something we couldn’t really influence) and the whole community including FAmSCo lived in uncertainty how much money we have spent and how much we still can spend. So we rather didn’t spend. And because the classic corporate rule says “if you don’t spend it, you’ll lose it”, Fedora’s budget was shrinking.
• FAmSCo evaluated almost all funding requests, so instead of focusing on “big” problems, we were dealing with day-to-day problems which is something a steering committee is not for.
• Decision-making was pretty centralized and local communities were not so involved.

And here are the changes:

• BUDGETING – first we wanted to remove the uncertainty which caused that we were afraid to spend money and do activities. Before that, FAmSCo was just approving requests and kept asking CommArch/OSAS if we still have money left and mostly we didn’t get any answer because of slow financial reporting. Now, we actually do budget planning and ask OSAS for an annual budget for the upcoming year. It has two positive outcomes: 1. we actually know how much we can spend and if we properly track our expenses we don’t even have to rely on Red Hat’s financial reporting and know how much money we have left. 2. if you’re making a budget and asking for money, you have to have an idea how to spend them. So instead of planning just expenses you actually plan activities on which you spend money. Of course, you can’t plan everything. There are always unexpected activities, new opportunities. We don’t want to turn them down just because we don’t have them in the budget. That’s why there is a treasurer/budget wrangler in each region that adjust and balance the budget. Budgeting is new to us, so this fiscal year is going to be a lot about gaining experience.
• POWER TO REGIONS! we also believe that the power should be closer to community members. So we decided that the overall budget would be divided into 4 regional budgets: NA, EMEA, LATAM APAC. Each region had to think about what activities they’d do this fiscal year and how to fund them. It really helped some regions because until then they had hardly done any planning and had problems to spend money allocated to them. And I must say it helped all regions in the end. Now, regions are responsible for their budgets and they also evaluate and approve funding requests that belong to the region.
• NEW APPROVAL PROCESS – because we gave regional communities the right to approve requests, we had to change the approval process. It was really difficult to find rules that would be applicable in all regions. We really didn’t want to damage what was working well for regions. So we decided to give them freedom within some boundaries and provide referenced rules. The boundary is $2000 limit per request. If it’s higher it needs to be approved by FAmSCo. The referenced rules are that expenses up to $500 can be approved on peer-review level (by a FAmSCo member, or community credit card holder), and expenses between $500 and $2000 needs to be approved by the local community (votes from 5 ambassadors at a regional meeting). Those limits and rules are not enforced by FAmSCo, regions can set whatever they want as long as they ask FAmSCo about requests over $2000, stay within their budget, and do everything transparently.

On the picture above, you can see the overall process. First step is budget planning. Regional community members have to get together and plan what they’d like to do in the next year and how much money they will need for it. Once their plan is approved by Fedora budget owner, they have a budget and know what events/activities/… they have money for, e.g. $2000 for FOSDEM. The approval process is about decisions how exactly they’d like to spend the money. How much do we need for swag at the booth at FOSDEM, is this contributor worth sponsoring airfare to the conference? All those requests should be in separate tickets and approved separately. The third step is payment itself. If it’s reimbursement it’s where community credit card holders come to the stage. They should make sure that all conditions under which the expense was approved were met and make the payment happen.

FAQ

I’m a community credit card holder, trusted by Red Hat to make payments. Why do I have to ask for an approval?

You surely are trusted by Red Hat to make payments, but payments are not expenses. Payments are done from a bank credit, expenses are done from a budget. Every payment has to match a budget expense in the end. You can find different budgets to make expenses from, but if your payment should end up as an expense in one of the regional budgets, in other words, become their expense, it’s fair to play according to their rules.

FAmSCo is taking power from us!

In fact, FAmSCo has given up a lot of power. We no longer approve most requests. FAmSCo now mainly serves as a supervisor making sure the whole system works and no one abuses it. Most of the power is now in the regional communities, much closer to community members.

Why should FAmSCo dictate us how to spend Fedora Project’s money? It’s not the emperor of Fedora Project, it only takes care of the Fedora Ambassadors program.

The whole governance and budget system I’m talking about applies to the regional support budget which has always been handled by ambassadors. But that doesn’t mean other contributors are excluded. They have an equal right to ask for funding from this budget as long as they follow the rules.

Why do we need rules anyway? We’re a community of Fedora enthusiasts. Good intentions should be enough.

Well, you’re a community of hundreds of people, maybe thousands. Such big communities can’t work without rules. That’s a fact. The governance and budget system helps us plan, prioritize with limited resources and make sure money is spent wisely. All our expenses also end up in RH accounting which has to follow many rules and legal restrictions. We tried to design the system to be as least bureaucracy as possible and we’re open to improvements if you think that there is too much red tape in some processes.

Useful links:

Reimbursements

EMEA Budget for FY14
NA Budget for FY14
LATAM Budget for FY14
APAC Budget for FY14

Another distro popularity polls

Last summer, I published results of survey organized by the biggest Czech Linux portal where Fedora was the 3rd most popular Linux distribution. Today, the second biggest Czech Linux portal ABCLinuxu.cz published results of a very similar survey. Shares are slightly different, but Fedora was again the 3rd most popular distribution. The TOP10 is:

1. Ubuntu 37.09% (53)
2. Debian 18.78% (17)
3. Fedora 18.39% (12)
4. Linux Mint 14.03% (10)
5. Arch 13.36% (9.5)
6. (open)SUSE 11% (7.4)
7. Gentoo 8.68% (6.7)
8. Mageia 2.51% (<2)
9. Slackware 2.20% (<2)
10. Mandriva 1.18% (<2)

The number in brackets indicates shares from the survey done by the other portal in summer. Shares are slightly different, but order on the first seven positions is the same and there are the same distributions in TOP10. The other portal – root.cz – is read by broader audience while ABCLinuxu.cz has more die-hard Linux fans among their readers. You can see that Ubuntu has a much larger share outside the core Linux user base. On the other hand, at least in the Czech Republic, it has lost some core Linux user base because in 2010, Ubuntu had 44.3% in the same survey. Over 18% for Fedora is a good result. It’s definitely on the rise in the Czech Republic which is not such a big surprise because we promote Fedora quite a lot and the largest engineering office of Red Hat also has some impact.

What’s interesting is distro popularity among groups of people with different length of Linux experience:

As you can see, Ubuntu is very popular among Linux newbies. Almost 60 percent of them choose Ubuntu to be their first Linux experience. Quite surprisingly to me, Fedora is the second most popular distro among newbies. Fedora has pretty much the same popularity through all groups, but it’s especially popular among newbies and then among people with >15 years of Linux experience. I suppose those are mainly users that started with Red Hat Linux.

There were also other categories:

Server: Debian 50.92%, CentOS 23.61%, Ubuntu 16.22%, RHEL 13.79%, Gentoo 8.87%, (open)SUSE 7.24%, Fedora 5.55%, Arch 4.81%, Slackware 3.33%. So Fedora is much less popular on servers.

Enteprise: RHEL 75.68%, SUSE 22.77%, Oracle 4.94%, Mandriva 1.55%. RHEL is dominating this category.

The survey also showed that the Linux user base is getting older. 43% of people who participated in the survey are over 30 and only 25% of them are students.

FOSDEM, F18 release party,…

Busy times. Just a week after I returned from my adventurous journey to FUDCon Lawrence, I had to get ready for FOSDEM 2013. The night before leaving for Brussels, I found out that no one was bringing equipment for the booth and swag. So I stuffed my suitcase with tablecloth, stickers, buttons, and a hundred of baseball caps. Fortunately, Jarda Reznik was going to Brussels by car, so I gave him the heavy stuff – rollup banner, mugs, and DVDs. Even though our booth was decent in the end, the organization wasn’t very good this year. FOSDEM 2013 is #1 event in EMEA and we should give it more. Booth staffing didn’t work very well either. We always had some people there, but I found very unfortunate that people who didn’t get a penny from Fedora Project had to stay at the booth while some people, who got sponsored, spent there very little or no time. Next time, we have to make 100% clear that people who get sponsored go to FOSDEM to primarily help Fedora Project which pretty much means helping at the booth.

FOSDEM was crowded like always and we ran out of swag and DVDs at the beginning of the second day. Then Peter Robinson saved us and loaned us a brand-new model of OLPC with touchscreen. That was a new attraction of our booth. A lot of people came to our booth and asked if they could buy a Fedora T-shirt. It was really heart-breaking to turn them all down while all other projects were selling stuff like T-shirts, mugs, hoodies etc. I brought some Fedora mugs and baseball caps, but it was enough just for Fedora contributors I met. Inability to sell, and thus produce more expensive stuff such as T-shirts and hoodies is our big marketing disadvantage. Not only are we unable to satisfy our fans, but it also harm our marketing because people with Fedora cloths become walking advertisements.

Anyway, in spite of all those problems, my feelings from FOSDEM 2013 are generally positive. It’s a bit too crowded and large event to my taste, but where else can you meet so many people from the open source world? I was really glad I met several new Fedora contributors that I hadn’t met in person before.

The day after I returned from Brussels, we held a Fedora 18 release party in Brno office of Red Hat which I was organizing. It was not the ideal date because there is a break between semesters at universities and students have always the biggest group of attendees. But we were still able to attract several dozen people. This time, we had talks on GNOME 3.6 (by me), How to test Fedora (by Kamil Páral), DNF (by Aleš Kozumplík), PostgreSQL 9.2 (Honza Horák).

The empire of Fedora QA needs you, Kamil Páral says.

Another event is just in two months – Developer Conference 2013 which now takes most of my time because I’m one of the organizers.

Fedora/BSD hoax

You may have noticed the news that one of the proposed features for Fedora 19 is the FreeBSD kernel and one of the proponents is me. You may wonder if I’m crazy or why I’m so into the BSD kernel suddenly. Let me explain it:

First of all: I didn’t create the feature page on the Fedora wiki.

It all started with an article about one of proposed features for F19 – Cinnamon as the deafault DE. In the discussion under the article, people wondered what are the odds that something like this gets accepted. Pavel “Pavlix” Šimerda found it very unlikely and agreed saying:

I see it very unlikely, too. Anyone can propose anything. If I make a feature page of switching Fedora to the BSD kernel, will I make it to the news articles at abclinuxu.cz as well?

Actually, I tried to come up with some very unlikely feature to make my point and I could have easily come up with for example Unity as the default DE. The first thing that came to my mind was the BSD kernel. That’s where I ended with this case. Later someone picked up the idea and created the feature page. I got a link to it and I saw my name there, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. It’s a joke that no one can take seriously, right? Well, I underestimated Linux journalists. Phoronix published an article about it, Slashdot followed even though Elad Alfassa marked it as a joke page. They stated me as a Red Hat employee that proposes such a feature which is when I realized that it might not be a good idea to leave my name under something I didn’t actually propose. Because I was offline at the moment, I asked Jarda Reznik to remove my name from the page. There are three lessons to learn from this case:

me: don’t leave your name under something you actually didn’t sign even though it looked like completely harmful fun.

journalists: existing feature page doesn’t mean that the feature is planned for the next release of Fedora. Until it’s accepted it means nothing.

all of us: don’t believe everything that is written at Linux magazines/portals. As you can see, a complete hoax backed by nothing can make it from nowhere to the headlines of most popular portals very quickly.

Developer Conference 2013 just one month away!

Time flies and Developer Conference 2013 that we have already been preparing for months is just one month away. The program is pretty much finalized and it looks great. Last year, we thought it was not possible to pack more in two days. Well, this year, the program is even richer. We have 60 talks, 18 lightning talks, 20 workshops in 10 sections (Kernel, Core OS, Networking, System Management, Security, Desktop, Documentation, Quality Assurance, Cloud, JBoss). And there are also other events outside the conference program: systemd hackfest and FAD will take place on Thurs and Fri before the conference, GNOME Docs guys will come here for a 5-day-long sprint, Red Hat and SUSE RPM guys will have a session, Arquillian guys will hold a hackfest.

We expanded the social event a bit. Because the university canteen, where we hosted the social event in the last years, was destroyed in reconstruction, we moved it to a legendary Brno club Fléda which is just a few minutes away from the venue. We’ll have a live band etc. Of course, you can always head off somewhere else which is why we prepared a map with all recommended restaurants, cafes, groceries,… near to the venue.

We booked about 60 rooms in Avanti Hotel for the conference and they’re all gone. Avanti is fully booked now (we might get more rooms later if they receive some cancellations). Check out our Accommodation page where you can find other recommended hotels if you haven’t booked one in Avanti. There are many hotels and B&B at different price levels in Brno. Just use hotel.com, booking.com,…

And BTW the conference admission is free and we don’t require people to register. We just keep it in a very free and open source way

Oh, and I almost forgot: please help us spread the word about DevConf 2013 in your LUGs, countries,… We have a nice set of banners.

Traveling to FUDCon in Lawrence

Today early in the morning, I returned from FUDCon North America 2013 that took place in Lawrence, Kansas. What had been a trip I’d really looked forward to became my worst travel experience ever (and believe me, traveling is my hobby, I’ve traveled a lot in my life). This blogpost describes the journey to and from the conference more than FUDCon itself because unfortunately I spent more time traveling than being in Lawrence.

Thursday

My trip started in Brno at 2 am. I took a bus to Vienna Airport. The more we were getting closer to Vienna the more I was getting worried because it was snowing a lot. I arrived at the airport at 5 am and all still seemed OK, all flights were on in spite of the snowing. Unfortunately my flight to Washington D.C. at 10 am was first delayed and then completely canceled, so were all other flights in Vienna after all. I wanted to cancel the whole trip and get a full refund because the flight cancellation meant I was going to miss one whole day out of three days of FUDCon. But there were thousands of people with canceled flights and Austrian Airlines didn’t take any individual requests. They just gave away hotel vouchers and told everyone to come back for rebooking tomorrow. We even couldn’t get our checked-in bags. After hours of waiting in lines, I finally got to our hotel in Vienna just to find out the lobby was completely full of people who were there to check in, too. Another line to wait :-/

This is how the weather looked in Vienna.

Friday

On Friday, I had to get up at 4 am to get back to the airport early enough to rebook. Even though I came early I had to wait two hours in the line. My conditions were clear: get me to Lawrence today or give me all money back. They offered me a ticket Vienna-Dusseldorf-Chicago-Kansas City. I went for it. But our flight to Dusseldorf got delayed by 40 minutes because the plane wasn’t ready. We boarded the plane, but missed good weather and were called off from the runaway like 2-3 times because of snowing. But it wasn’t the end. Then a group a passenger decided to leave the flight and we had to wait for 40 minutes to get stairs and another 30 minutes to get their baggage out. In the end, I wanted to leave, too, because it was clear I’d miss my connection. But I was told that only passenger with Dusseldorf as the final destination could leave. By that time, there was already too much ice on the plane’s wings, so we had to go for deicing. After 5 hours of shuffling at the airport, we finally took off. When we arrived to Dusseldorf the plane to Chicago was already above the Atlantic. In addition, I found out they’d lost my suitcase that I hadn’t seen for almost two days. I really wanted to cancel the whole trip. I noticed there was a flight to Prague which could get me home the same day. I went to Lufthansa counter and I asked for the flight to Prague and full refund. But the ticket was booked with United and only United could refund me, so we called United and they were total jerks because they claimed I’d already started the trip and thus they couldn’t give me full refund. And they were willing to give me a ticket to the original destination (Vienna), but Vienna wasn’t accepting flights again. So it was clear I got stuck in Dusseldorf till the next day. At that moment, I decided to go all the way and I asked for rebooking. I got a ticket Dusseldorf-Frankfurt-Chicago-Kansas City. At least, I got a room in a close hotel and some basic hygiene stuff (tooth brush, shower gel,…).

Saturday

I had to get up at 4 am again (uh, how I hate getting up early!). My third attempt to get to Kansas started with a flight to Frankfurt at 6 am. Unfortunately without my suitcase because it was going to arrive to Dusseldorf at 11 am. The connection in Frankfurt was OK except for the fact that I was picked for the extra security check. They tossed all things from my backback, coins from my wallet,… on the table. I had to undergo unpleasant body check etc. But I finally got on a flight over the Atlantic! We arrived to Chicago over one hour delayed which drove me crazy because I had only 45 minutes to get through the immigration, customs, to another terminal, through the security again. Normally, it would not be possible, but I finally got a bit lucky and everything was extraordinarily fast. I made it on time for the flight to Kansas City where Dennis Gilmore picked me up at 4.30 pm (thank you, Dennis!). I had to make a quick stop in Wall-mart to get myself underwear and socks because I’ve been missing my suitcase for 3 days already (it’s not a great experience to wear the same socks in closed winter boots for three days). I arrived to Lawrence just on time to get on the bus heading to FUDPub. I also got a hoodie from other guys who collected money to buy it for me (thank you, guys, it was a nice moment after all those troubles!). FUDPub was fun and it was nice to meet people I know from mailing lists, but never met in person before. Although I had been up for over 30 hours that day, I really enjoyed the night including the local band.

Sunday

Sunday was my first day of FUDCon, but because it was the last day of the conference it was difficult to jump in. Some people were already leaving and most discussions and sessions had already started the day before. So I worked on some governance stuff and in the afternoon I had a session with  Robyn Bergeron, Ruth Suehle, and John Rose. We touched stuff such as FY14 budgets, new reimbursement guidelines, FADs, credit card holders, changes in FUDCon etc. We made some things clear, but we should definitely continue in discussions at FOSDEM next week! By the time we finished the session, FUDCon was pretty much over and people were heading back to the hotel. That’s when my friend from my years in the USA came and we spent several hours in a Mexican restaurant catching up on our lives. I also bought a new suitcase to travel with back home because my old one still hadn’t arrived.

Monday

I almost missed the shuttle bus to the airport in Kansas City because my cell phone ran out of battery for some strange reason. Fortunately, I woke up by myself 20 minutes before it was leaving. I was really looking forward to much faster travel back home. But it all changed again. My flight to Washington D.C. was delayed by 3 hours and I asked for rebooking. They found me a new route through Chicago and London. The flight to Chicago was also delayed, but I was going to have a plenty of time in Chicago, so I didn’t care. I also met the French Fedora guys on that flight. The flight went OK, but then we started descending fast and the pressure was changing so quickly that I thought it’d break my ear-drums. All kids started screaming. The landing was quick and we stopped on the runaway. I noticed there were many firefighter’s cars along the runaway and when I saw firefighters running towards our plane I realized that all the interest is for us. The captain told us that we had an emergency situation and asked us to evacuate the plane quickly and calmly. It was like -15C outside and it was a bit chaotic because we were first directed to a firefighter’s car, then to a bus and then to another bus. Fortunately this accident didn’t cause any problems to my schedule. They drove us to the gate, I got an appreciation voucher and continued to my next flight to London which was surprisingly on time.

Firefighters rescuing us.

Tuesday

I had to wait for 6 hours for the next flight at London Heathrow. I tried to work on my laptop for a few hours. When I was about to go to the gate, I found out that my debit card was missing. Last time I saw it was when I bought the WiFi connection. I must have dropped it somewhere or someone took it when I put it on my belonging next to me when I was working. Anyway, it was gone. So I called my bank and blocked the card. But I didn’t know my credentials for telebanking, so they didn’t tell me if someone had withdrawn any money. The flight to Vienna was OK and pretty much on time. But when I arrived to baggage claim I found out that they’d lost even my new suitcase! I went to the lost&found counter to file a ticket and found out that the suitcase was in Washington. I also asked about my old suitcase because I hadn’t had any updates about it for several days. I was told that it arrived to Kansas City in the morning. Awesome, right on time! What was even more awesome was that because of the lost baggage ticket filing I missed the bus to Brno. So I had to wait for three more hours and arrived to Brno after midnight. Right after I arrived home, I checked my bank account and fortunately no strange charges.

So this was my trip to FUDCon in Lawrence. It involved 55 hours of total delay, 5 different airports in 4 countries, 7 flights, 3 different hotels, 2 lost bags, 1 emergency landing, 1 lost debit card, and countless lines and terrible meals at airports and on planes.  But it also proved to me that I can count on my Fedora friends when I get in trouble and therefore one of our four foundations “Friends” is valid.

No, we don’t. We already are!

Testing GNOME 3 on family members

I’ve read a lot of bashing about GNOME 3. It makes the overall negative impression about the new generation of GNOME. In fact, it’s because negative opinions are usually more vocal than positive ones. Satisfied users are using the software and don’t have to write blogposts about it. That’s a reason why I decided to write this blogpost. In the last year, I tried to test GNOME 3 pretty much on all my family members. They all got used to it without bigger problems. But I’d like to write a bit more about one family member who got a computer with GNOME 3 just recently – my mom. She had a really old laptop with Fedora 14 and GNOME 2 because nothing newer would run well on it (512 MB RAM is just not enough these days). But Fedora 14 has been EOL for quite a while and hardware was very unsatisfying. That’s why she got a newer ThinkPad. I decided to install Fedora 18 on it. It was still a development version, but I had two good reasons: 1. I didn’t want to undergo upgrade in a few months, 2. there were significant changes between GNOME 3.4 and 3.6 and I didn’t want her to get used to something that would change soon. In addition, I think Fedora 18 is pretty stable if you get past Anaconda or Fedup.

Before I get to my mom’s experience with GNOME 3, I have to explain why it was my mom who was the most interesting member of our family to test GNOME 3 on. She is a completely unexperienced user. She’d refused to use computers until she was 45. Then she was forced to use them because of her business and because she learned that she could auction antiquities at Aukro (Czech eBay) But computers and her were never friends. I tried KDE, LXDE with her. She was using Windows for a while. Last time, she was using GNOME 2, but was struggling even after two years.

I installed Fedora 18 on her new laptop and explained her how GNOME 3 works. And here are some findings from her experience with it:

• She hasn’t called since then! It’s something unbelievable because when she had GNOME 2 she called all the time and I felt like a technical support. My colleagues made fun of me at work.
• When I called her and asked her how the new system was, she replied that she liked it much more than the one before which was really surprising for me because I’d expected a wave of complaints because everything was different and all her old instructions were useless. My mom usually doesn’t like changes.
• Activities overview helps her a lot. She never understood the concept of apps and windows. Her work with computers was always very task-based. Once a new window covered the old one, it ceased to exist for her. She switches between tasks, not between apps or windows. When she wants to go back to writing or reading emails, she clicks the mail icon no matter if the app is open or not. In GNOME 2, she easily ended up with 3 instances of one app.  Now, she just needs to remember to press the “Super” icon to get to Activities where she sees all open windows or big icons of her favourite apps. She says she gets oriented much better than with task bar in GNOME 2 which she never truly understood.
• Having everything under one key (the Windows/Super key) makes her life much easier. It’s pretty much the only keyboard shortcut she knows.
• Powerusers complain that GNOME 3 doesn’t start another instance of an app if its icon is clicked. Well, my mom appreciates it because when she for example clicks the envelope icon in Activities she gets the email client no matter if it’s already open or not. And she doesn’t end up with several instances like in GNOME 2.
• Large icons work. I always wondered why GNOME 3 had such large icons. My mom likes them.
• She was a bit surprised by absence of buttons to maximize and minimize windows. I added them, but after I explained her that she could maximize by dragging the window to the top of the screen and there was no need to minimize windows, she told me that she didn’t want the icons there. So I removed them again and she’s never mentioned that again.
• Virtual workspaces is something that she’s never used. It didn’t change with GNOME 3. That’s why it’s good that they’re not visible if the user is not using them.
• I even taught her to search for apps by typing. What she didn’t understand is that you can start typing immediately after switching to Activities. Average users seem to need a text field to type.
• This is a fresh experience: she called me today that she’d wanted to turn the laptop off, she’d clicked the “Power Off” button and ended up with a screen where there was just time and the computer wouldn’t turn off even after pressing the “Power Off” hardware button. It sounded weird. I was already thinking of a hardware failure etc., recommended she should take the battery off. Then I got it. She misclicked and locked her screen instead of powering off. She had no idea that it was a lockscreen. In this case, GNOME 3 could be more intuitive. To defense GNOME 3, I must say that until today my mom had no idea that something like a lockscreen existed.

Those are just a few findings from my mom’s first experiences with GNOME 3. Before I installed it on her computer, I called it an ultimate usability test of GNOME 3 because if my mom can use GNOME 3 anyone can. GNOME 3 has succeeded in it so far.

EMEA FAD in Rheinfelden

I visited EMEA Fedora Activity Day in Rheinfelden in Germany the last weekend. The journey was quite long for me. Originally, I wanted to go by car with Jaroslav Reznik, but then Jaroslav canceled and I didn’t want to drive 10 hours alone. So I took a train to Prague and went by bus from there to Basel, Switzerland from where I took a train to Rheinfelden.

I was the first one who arrived on Friday. Others arrived in the evening. The total number of ambassadors was 8 (3 from Italy, 3 from Germany, 1 from Switzerland, and 1 from the Czech Republic). Although the number of ambassadors was as we expected because of last-minute cancellations, we still got a quite a lot of stuff done:

• we planned all major events in 2013 and made a budget estimation. We also agreed that all important events (LinuxTag, FOSDEM, LinuxCon,…) need proper planning and should be attended by at least one experienced ambassador to make sure that Fedora is represented well at these events.
• we also discussed funding approvals and reimbursement process. Some people complained that Paypal didn’t work for everyone and we didn’t have any other means of reimbursement. That’s something FAmSCo should work on in the next months. We cannot change it ourselves, but we can at least bug people in Red Hat who can.
• SWAG was also discussed. I think we’ve improved swag production quite a lot in the last year. We’ve got enough pins, stickers, media. I just received a delivery of baseball caps and mugs (every attendee of FAD got one). But it can definitely be improved. There were a lot of ideas going around. But as you know talk is cheap, so I brought a lot of action items in this area and we’ll make steps towards to making it happen.
• another topic was ambassadors program in EMEA and how we can improve it. The main problem we have is that we still have a good stream of new ambassadors, but they don’t become new leaders. So we’d like to improve the post-mentoring process. Now, ambassadors have to go through mentorship (which we agreed is a good thing), but once they pass and become ambassadors they’re left with no assistance and it’s up to them if they get more involved in promoting Fedora. We’d like to change that and create some kind of “personal development plan” for new ambassadors. It should not be enforcing, but we should show them some path to grow in our community and pull them in what’s going on. One of the ideas was that we should make sure that every new ambassador is invited to and sponsored for one big event in his/her region. This way, they can meet other, more experienced community members and see how Fedora presence and promotion is organized.
• another thing we’d like to do is ambassadors census. We’d like to contact two most active ambassadors in each country and ask them about the situation in their country (the state of Fedora community, events they’re covering, what they miss, what they’d improve etc.). Because we realized that contributors in some countries were very active on their national level, but were not really involved on the continent-wide level. In some countries, quite a lot is going on, but we simply don’t know about that because they don’t attend meetings, write to the mailing list, post blogposts on Planet Fedora etc.

EMEA FAD was I think a productive event and I’d like to thank Gerold Kassube who organized it and hosted us in a lovely castle on the bank of the Rhine. He invited us to dinner in a special restaurant in Basel where there is complete darkness and blind people serve tables. We spent three hours in darkness having dinner and it was a very interesting experience.
On Sunday, the Italian ambassadors took me to Zurich on their way to Milan. I then continued by bus from there to Prague and Brno, arrived on Monday moving and jumped right in my work. It was an exhausting journey, because it snowed all the way to Brno (I was really glad I hadn’t gone by car). I always ask myself if those exhausting travel are worth it. But I must say they are. Some things just can’t be discussed on IRC, Google Hangout etc.