KDE at Solutions Linux 2009
written on Tuesday, April 7, 2009
From the 31th of march to the 2nd of april, the yearly Solutions Linux trade show held in Paris. Of course, KDE was here.
Day 1
Sébastien Renard (KDE French translation coordinator) and I installed the KDE booth. It was a bit minimalist: one A2-sized KDE logo, two chairs, one table and two laptops, but at least we had a booth this year (last year we failed to book a booth in time and had to ask a friend booth for some area to hold our laptops...) We even had 150 Kubuntu 8.10 CDs to give (Sorry Markey, maybe I got all of them?).
Sébastien is a power user of the Kontact suite, so it is always impressive when he demonstrates Korganizer because he can show visitors an agenda packed with several years of real meetings. He can also demonstrate a KMail setup with 6 different mailboxes, some of them using ssh tunnels to fetch their content, all graphically configured from within KMail.
This year though, his Kontact presentation was a bit different when it comes to TODO lists. He often ended up demonstrating... Yokadi :). Not surprising, given that Sébastien is Yokadi most active contributor these days (I need to catch up, otherwise he will soon have more commits than me :) ). One of his tasks for the show was in fact "Convert as much people as possible to Yokadi"!
In the afternoon we received reinforcements as Gaël Beaudoin joined us to manage the KDE booth, helping us handling the crowd of curious users, charming them with KWin goodness and other 4.2 niceties.
On the bad side, I was supposed to spend half of my time on the Canonical booth, but completely failed at it and spent all day on the KDE booth...
Day 2
Kubuntu stickers were delivered for the KDE booth, yay for goodies!
Equiped with my brand new Canonical shirt, I managed to work on both booths this day (and the day after), spending 2 hours on each one. It was great to get to know some of my new colleagues. I had a nice chat with one of the sale managers, and discovered he is actually a KDE user. It seems KDE is popular among Canonical employees too!
I also had the occasion to try various netbooks running different versions of UNR, Ubuntu Netbook Remix. There is quite a few interesting things in it, I especially like how the title bar of maximized windows moves inside the GNOME menu, leaving more vertical space available for the application.
An interesting thing I realized while demonstrating UNR is that people are more opened to new user experiences on a netbook because they expect it to behave differently than a regular laptop or desktop. This means netbooks are really a platform where Plasma could be used to its full potential and provide attractive and innovative interfaces.
In the afternoon I joined the crowd following the crazy GCU guys (fr) demonstrating against HADOPI law (fr). Lots of fun!
- Zombi butchers ready to cut your connection!
- The butchers hijacking a conference to spread the word:
Videos: http://ghantoos.org/misctuff/boucherie-2009/
Day 3
Everybody felt a bit tired on day three, except visitors :)
While chatting a bit with C., Canonical booth responsible, our conversation went on GCU and I started to explain the subtleties of HADOPI as well as narrate the most memorable GCU actions from last years. When I told one year they visited all professional booths, hit alt-tab on exposed machines, and boo-ed the booth if they were running Windows, C. was surprised and asked me "But it's an open source trade-show, how comes they were running Windows?". This is coming from someone who is not from a technical service. If only everyone on the show had the same way of thinking...
Since our GNOME friends took advantage of a few minutes where we left the KDE booth empty to cover our table with GNOME stickers, we had to strike back today. Sebastien thus proceeded to stick Kubuntu stickers at various places of the booth including under the mouse... Yes, we are supposed to be grown-ups :). In the end we had fun trolling discussing both project release announcements, comparing GNOME Shell with Plasma and all kind of constructive dialogs you can expect from tired geeks...