This year’s edition was once again a blast. The best opportunity to put faces into the names we interact daily throughout the communication channels of our community, and to meet new folk.
Once again a volunteer, this year a chaired the sessions in the auditorium during the first day, organized one of the newcomers activities, and the football game. Don’t forget to check out the conference photos.
Lots of work got done, as you must have read from other posts in Planet GNOME. It was no different for Boxes. Our annual Birds of a Feather session was more of a whole afternoon chat under the shadow in front of the university cafeteria. We managed to count with the presence of very experienced members of our community to give us some valuable insights on how we can sanely introduce new features and optimize the existing ones.
We discussed the challenges and possibilities of the OVF support, enabling us to Import and Export virtualization appliances allowing users to easily share their VMs with each other, and perform migrations and backups. That is work that has already started and will be partially shipped in 3.30, and later complemented in the next cycle.
There we often heard of feature requests for enhancements we already landed. Therefore justifying my recent work in the new machine assistant to make the “Download an OS” page, and remote connections more discoverable. Expect more work in this area, making it easier for users to find and benefit from features we already have, such as: bridged network, file sharing, clipboard integration, notifications passthrough, multiple brokers, etc…
Another relevant topic fairly discussed during our meeting was the integration of Boxes into the Purism mobile development workflow as a simulator in which they could easily run their Flatpak bundles built with GNOME Builder. Alberto Fanjul participated in the discussions describing their requirements and suggesting features. Expect some interesting work in this regard for our next development cycle.
A few more specific topics were discussed related to changes under the hood related to speeding up things and making some processes more fail-proof.
GUADEC was also an opportunity for me to meet our Google Summer of Code mentee Adi Manglik, and chat about his challenges adding Power consumption capabilities to GNOME Usage and of being a newcomer in our community.
I would like to thank the GUADEC organizers for hosting an amazing conference. The Social Events were great, from the sangria at the beach party to the guided tour to Alcazaba ending with a delightful party at the sunset with incredible flamenco dances, it is all fantastic with friends.
Last but not least, I’d like to thank my employer Red Hat for sponsoring my trip! I hope to see you all again very soon!
