I spent Friday and Saturday at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, helping out a little at the GNOME stand. LinuxTag is much better than I expected. Somehow I always thought it would be just an expo, with a bunch of boring corporate stands. But there’s a great sense of activity and community, and there’s heaps of high-quality talks all day, every day. I’ll be at the next one. By the time I left, I had almost completely lost my voice, and I’m still mostly mute.

However, the people there are quite a bit more geeky than at GUADEC. Nobody at GUADEC would ask Michael Meeks about easy ways to build GNOME on LFS without hearing “I want it to be difficult. How can you make that easier?”. There were also very many SUSE users who had never even seen a GNOME desktop before, which explained their misconceptions.

It was great to meet lots of the German GNOME community for the first time, such as Sven Herzberg, Matthias Warkus, and the GPE developers. And it’s always good to meet Daniel Elstner and Frank Rehberger again. Michael Meeks asked everyone to hack on Mono, including me – I don’t think he knows who I am.