Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/08/16/guadec-2016.html

Last Friday, I gave the first keynote at GUADEC 2016. I was delighted for
the invitation from the GNOME Foundation to deliver this talk, which I
entitled Confessions of a command line geek: why I don’t use GNOME
but everyone else should.

The Chaos Computer Club
assisted the GUADEC organizers in recording the talks, so you can see
here a great recording of my talk here (and
also, the slides).
Whether the talk itself is great — that’s for you to
watch and judge, of course.

The focus of this talk is why the GNOME desktop is such a central
component for the future of software freedom. Too often, we assume that
the advent of tablets and other mobile computing platforms means the laptop
and desktop will disappear. And, maybe the desktop will disappear, but the
laptop is going nowhere. And we need a good interface that gives software
freedom to the people who use those laptops. GNOME is undoubtedly the best
system we have for that task.

There is competition. The competition is now, undeniably, Apple. Unlike
Microsoft, who hitherto dominated desktops, Apple truly wants to make
beautifully designed, and carefully crafted products that people will not
just live with, but actually love. It’s certainly possible to love
something that harms you, and Apple is so carefully adept creating products
that not only refuse to give you software freedom, but Apple goes a step
further to regularly invent new ways to gain lock-down control and
thwarting modification by their customers.

We have a great challenge before us, and my goal in the keynote was to
express that the GNOME developers are best poised to fight that battle and
that they should continue in earnest in their efforts, and to offer my help
— in whatever way they need it — to make it happen. And, I
offer this help even though I readily admit that I don’t need
GNOME for myself, but we as a community need it to advance
software freedom.

I hope you all enjoy the talk, and also check
out Werner
Koch’s keynote, We want more centralization, do we?, which
was also about a very important issue. (There was
also an
LWN article about Werner’s keynote if you prefer to read to watching.)
And, finally, I thank the GNOME Foundation for covering my travel expenses
for this trip.