HAPPY TOGETHER

The Gnome community gathered in Stuttgart, Germany on May 29–31 for the annual Gnome User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) [1]. The conference had a tight schedule that included four parallel tracks. The rooms were often filled, starting with the very first talk by Keith Packard of Freedesktop.org. A special track showcased new Gnome multimedia applications, such as the video editor Pitivi, the Fluendo streaming server, and the Xiph and Dirac video codecs. Better Among the more entertaining speakers were some of the usual suspects, such as the self-proclaimed monkeys of Ex-Ximian. In his keynote Miguel de Icaza – apart from evangelizing Mono – set the agenda of finally making the Gnome desktop usable. In his slightly exaggerated view, Gnome is currently a piece of software that just “doesn’t work,” and he quoted a usability study Novell carried out in various countries (actually evaluating both KDE and Gnome).