Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

I've been using Xubuntu since Breezy Badger (5.10) and started actively contributing in 2009. I've also been the Artwork lead for several cycles (since November 2011). If you're a member of -team, you know me.

Contributions

It's possible that I missed/forgot stuff here, however here go a few of my past (and hopefully future) contributions.

Xubuntu

• Artwork
  • shimmer-themes
  • elementary-xfce
  • installer slideshow
  • plymouth theme
• LightDM GTK+ Greeter

Xfce

• Parole
• Various contributions through the Xfce Design SIG (xfwm4, xfce4-settings, thunar, etc.)
• Various bugfixes

Others

• light-locker
• gmusicbrowser
• Various bugfixes all over the place (unico-gtk3-engine, ubuntu-mono icon-theme, indicator-power, etc.)

Areas of Interest

As can be seen above, my areas of expertise lie mostly within artwork and application design. I'd like to continue contributing in this way obviously, but also continue to coordinate common efforts between Xubuntu and Xfce or other projects (like Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Lubuntu, Elementary etc).

I'm used to working with others and developing roadmaps has been one of my stronger sides in contributing to Xfce. I've obviously also contributed to Xubuntu in this respect before (e.g. by supporting the current/past XPL Pasi Lallinaho), but I think I can handle the organisational duties of being XPL well. While the XPL might not have the power to fix everything him/herself, I think he should help/enable others to step up. This is how I would interpret my role in the community: being a mediator and an enabler within the team.

I've filed my share of merge-requests and sponsorship requests, especially during the Trusty cycle. I know how frustrating bureaucracy can be and I hope that during the next cycles some of it won't be as necessary anymore as it was for now. However, it was good practice in the sense that I could see that the release team really reviews our changes and that I could get acquainted with the practice and routine of the release team. While I think bureaucracy and administration is boring, I'll help others inside or outside our team with it as good as I can for the sake of the project. If we can spread the workload in this respect among the team a bit, that'll help I guess. After all, not everyone hates bureaucracy equally.

Motivation

I'm partly applying for XPL because I really like how our team has come/grown together during the last few cycles, leading up to a fabulous 14.04 release. This last cycle showed that we have some areas that should be improved (mostly lack of uploaders), but also how we managed to overcome many of these hurdles together, because members of the team care about the project.

Also, I really like the road Xubuntu has taken since I started to contribute. Frankly, I started to contribute because I converted many friends to using Xubuntu and didn't want to run the same series of patches/adjustments on every install. So I decided to step up and try to make Xubuntu better.

I still think it is an excellent distro that excells in many areas. Summing it up: it's easy to use and not too heavy on the resources.

Future plans

Here go a few areas that I'd like to coordinate/foster during the next two years leading up to the next LTS release.

(1) Indicators

One thing I noticed is how much time we lose each cycle by accomodating changes that come flowing in from Ubuntu. This might be more low-level changes, such as the imminent switch to systemd (and the upstart integration before that) or changes in the indicator system or Gtk3. About many of these changes we cannot do much but try to live with them, but I'd like to get us a bit more independent of the indicators. We've spent much time to get them working right for Trusty, but I'd love to see Xfce Panel Plugins in a shape that allows them to compete with the consistency of the indicators. There are already a few efforts heading in this direction (work on a pulseaudio plugin, improved xfce4-power-manager plugin), it would be a great place for Xubuntu contributors/hackers to step up and contribute. Indicators can and would most likely still be added to the panel (especially indicator-application), but we'd be less prone of losing lots of core functionality in case they don't work for a release or two.

(2) Apps

I'd also like us to focus on our core apps until the next LTS release. This means reviewing them, considering and testing alternatives where needed. The changes ahead with Gtk3.12 are partly troubling (gtkheaderbars and the new gnome application menus breaking consistency in a few of our apps). While the Ubuntu/Unity developers patched most of those changes out for Trusty, they likely won't be carrying forward these patches but accomodate the upstream changes somehow. This means we should look out for that and see where we need to find new apps to match our needs. Some important Gtk3 apps that will likely be affected are calculator, evince and file-roller.

(3) Testing

One thing I noticed we can streamline is our testing experience. We've had various PPAs around in the Trusty cycle (partly because we had no people with push-rights in the team) and this turned out to be good. But we can improve this by streamlining the packages to two PPAs: one for new applications/packages (e.g. experimental or unreleased/unpackaged Panel Plugins or apps like xfdashboard or xfce4-taskbar-plugin) and one for packages that contain bugfixes for the current release. Xubuntu developers should be able to review and copy packages to these two PPAs from contributors, to ensure the quality of the PPAs.