Updates, Changes, and Plans
I have sort of purposely avoided replying to my previous post about my thoughts on Kubuntu, partly to let it die a slow and silent death, and partly because I’ve been thinking of more concrete ways to help Kubuntu, as well as some needed changes.
Updates
I made a list of my ideas for Kubuntu Hardy, which I’m hoping to bring up in the next Kubuntu Team Meeting. To put it briefly, the items include:
- Stability - bug fixing and polishing our upgrade paths and tools
- Testing - we really need more testers to make sure we cover as much use cases as possible, and we also need a structure for those testers
- Community involvement - leveraging the strength of the community (more later)
- Kubuntu’s package selection - reviewing what works and what doesn’t, what users want. KubuntuExtras comes to mind, as well as reviewing what we need to do with D3lphin and Strigi
- WinFOSS - based on nixternal’s thoughts on the matter
- Some other ideas, like a post-installation, new user “kit”
Most of my thoughts the past days have been on the involvement of the community in Kubuntu development. There have already been many posts, discussions and wikis dedicated to how users can start contributing, but there’s one idea that I think hasn’t been emphasized enough. The community *needs* to be involved. We all have a stake and a responsibility in making this work. This is not like usual commercial product models, where users are just static, helpless, passive recipients of a product. Instead, in most FOSS project, and specially in Linux distributions, every user is a potential contributor. So the next time you say “This sucks”, ask yourself what you’ve done lately to make it suck less.
Another part of my “user empowerment” drive is to help establish structures that will make it more convenient for users to make the transition from “user” to “contributor”. I’ve observed that most users remain within the community or medium that they’re most comfortable with. Users in the forums give their input in the forums, IRC users leave them in IRC, and so on. These people have good ideas, use cases, bugs, etc. But most of the time, they don’t make use of the established resources/areas for these, like the bugtracker, Launchpad, wikis, etc. Most of them are uncomfortable using these facilities, specially when they’re new. But I’ve also observed that, given enough time, motivation, and reinforcement, they do make that transition on their own. My idea is to make them comfortable in contributing within their own environment first, and eventually helping them move over to the more proper facilities. But at the same time, this should also be convenient for developers to monitor or observe, otherwise a lot of these information will fall on deaf ears. This is why I’ve proposed a few changes and processes in KubuntuForums.Net. I’m hoping this will, in some way, improve the situation a bit. I’m not expecting earth-shattering improvement, though. The constant river will wear down the mightiest rock, eventually.
My point in all these is that Kubuntu (and any other other FOSS project, like KDE) needs to leverage the power of their communities. Developers and users need to be able to interact and communicate well in order to make things work well. It’s a community endeavor, and everyone needs to get involved, from the commercial/corporate heads, to the core/main developers, to the everyday users.
Changes
Honesty time. I haven’t been really using Kubuntu full time ever since Gutsy was released. Ever since my brief stint with Gentoo earlier this year, I’ve been keeping an eye on a distro that has raised my curiosity. Gutsy was a sort of tipping point for a change. So for more than a month now, I’ve been using Source Mage GNU/Linux, a source-based distro based on a metaphor of “casting”, spells, and sorcery, which has been the primary focus of my curiosity (I’m a fantasy RPG fan). It also uses BASH for it’s package management system, a second point of curiosity. I’ll blog more about the details soon. And, I’m enjoying it. It definitely takes a lot more work than Kubuntu, but there are perks as well.
Am I leaving Kubuntu for good? Hell no! Not unless they drive me out with pitchforks and torches. I’m currently running Kubuntu in Virtualbox, which is great for testing and reverting when krap happens. I’m also leaving Kubuntu on the laptop, when I’m through doing quick test runs of some major binary distros. That will most probably be my Kubuntu development machine. I still believe in the magic of Ubuntu + KDE, and I’m still hoping for the best. But…
Plans
My involvement in Kubuntu needs to step down a notch. My original plan is to get involved in KDE development (hopefully the first, if not the most active, hardcore KDE developer from my country… yeah quite ambitious), and it still is my goal. But along the way, I fell in love with Kubuntu so much that I sort of lost sight of that goal. I tried hard to get involved in Kubuntu (although I still haven’t gotten myself to learn packaging through and through) but I have to accept I can’t really be a jack of all trades and expect to be extremely good at them, specially if I haven’t even progresses substantially in one of them. So again I have to re-prioritize and realign my goals. And focus, focus, focus. I’ll still be involved in Kubuntu, but, as my thoughts above imply, I’m just going to focus on the community aspects of Kubuntu. (So if ever I don’t show up everyday or 16 hours a day in #kubuntu, I haven’t really dropped off entirely. I’m just probably hiding to be able to focus. IRC is sooo addictive…).
So I’m going to focus a lot on programming for the next days, months, and maybe years. I have a lot of C++ catching up to do in order to comfortably move forward to GUI programming with Qt. I still need to touch on overloading, polymorphism, inheritance, templates, containers, and iterators before I can be comfortable with a lot of the Qt stuff I’ve read so far. I’m still hoping to finish at least reading those by the end of the year, which is just 5 weeks away…
Other plans also include a lot of writing (stuff about Source Mage, about programming, KDE, etc.), updating my web site’s layout as well as content, saving up for a Nokia N810, and a lot of other software projects/ideas. It feels kind of refreshing now that I’ve sorted out things (again). All that’s left is to put those plans into action.
