A month of low energy here. My work day is spent on a corporate project which I can’t talk about due to NDAs, although I can say it’s largely grunt work at the moment.

I’m not much of a gamer but sometimes you need a dose of solid fun. I finally started playing through Age of Empires II: The Conquerers, which has aged 24 years at this point, like a fine whisky. I played the original AoE when it came out, and I loved the graphics and the scenarios but got burned out by how dumb the units would be. All that was greatly improved in the second edition; although your guys will still sometimes wander off to chip away single-handedly at an enemy castle with their tiny sword, the new keyboard shortcuts make it less frustrating to micro-manage an army. I guess this is old news for everyone except me but, what a game.

I’m preparing some QA related talk submissions for FOSDEM 2025. I haven’t had time or energy to work on QA testing in GNOME, but I still have a clear idea of how we can move forwards, and I’ll keep talking about it a little longer to see if we can really go somewhere. There is still a small community joining our monthly call which gives a certain momentum to the project.

In terms of search, unfortunately I don’t feel much momentum around this at the moment. Besides the heroic contributions from Carlos, we did get a new IDE from Demigod’s and Rachel’s summer of code project. Somehow that hasn’t even made its way into Fedora 41, despite being part of the latest GNOME 47 release, so it’s still tricky to use it in demos. I looked at submitting some desktop search related talk to FOSDEM but there’s not a single dev room I can see where a proposal would even fit. There we are.

One final thought. This was a pretty engaging 20 minute talk by Cabel Sasser on the topic of a bizarre mural he saw at a McDonalds burger restaurant in Washington, USA. I recommend watching it if you haven’t, but you can also jump straight to the website about the mural’s artist, Wes Cook.

Photo of Wes Cook mural in McDonalds, Centralia

Something jumped out at me in the middle of the talk when he said “We all want to be seen.” Most folk want some recognition of the work we do and some understanding. In the software industry it’s very difficult because what we do is so specialised. But we’re now at a point where graphical desktops have been mainstream for nearly 30 years. Everyone uses one in their job. Smartphones are 15 years old and the tech isn’t hugely evolving.

A lot of this stuff is based on open source projects with 15+ year histories, and the people who can tell the stories of how they were made and how they work are all still around and still active.

It could be worth spending some effort recognising what we have, and talking about it, and the people who make it happen.

(If only we could have a desktop room at FOSDEM again…)

Sam Thursfield: Status update, 21/11/2024

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