Amazing day! It all started a couple of days back with me reading a blog entry on “Student Summit for Sustainability 2009″ happening at ETH, Zurich (the sister univ of EPFL and popularly known as the MIT of Europe, though EPFL is snatching that name slowly ) The interesting part of this summit was not “sustainability”  but the “Free” Software stuff squeezed in. So the date was 28th and thats the day I have my final exam. So why not head down to Zurich in the afternoon? And yes I did just that today. I am visiting Zurich City for the first time and after the usual photo shoots headed to ETH Zurich for the talks by Georg (President, FSF Europe) and Aaron Siego (President KDE e.V, KDE Architect).

As with everything in Switzerland, the sessions started sharp 1730 hrs. Georg talked on basics of Free Software (from the feedback, It seems not new stuff for the crowd). He then followed it with how KDE community were doing “catch up” work for the past several years with other Desktop Environments and appreciated the decision of the K folks to innovate and lead rather than ending up doing “keep up with the trend” type of development. Yes, any such gutsy decision always draws a lot of flak and flames in the community. We saw that recently with the FOSS.IN conference format changes as well . And viola, here we had KDE 4.0 followed by a much better and stable 4.1 and then now KDE 4.2.

 

Aaron took the stage and started showing some “bling” of KDE 4.2. What I liked the most is the way he backed up the eye candy he showed with the technical background and some overview of the underlying technology. I must admit, that it felt like I had been missing something revolutionary for so long. The amount of the thinking, innovation, effort that has gone into KDE 4.x are a lot to be put in a few words. Right from changing the “Desktop” image, panel handling, window resizing, file selection etc etc. so much thought on usability has been put in. The very mission of trying to make the Desktop experience feel very similar to handling things in real world, I think will help KDE go a long way.

After this we had the Apperitif or the drinks and food session. Everybody were give Free “Free beer” with loads of snacks to munch along with. As with any such socialising sessions, there were groups discussing random stuff from KDE to sucky Economic situation. Met loads of people and here I am sitting in the train back to Lausanne and writing this blog entry from Fedora 10 with KDE 4.1 running on it. I have *never* used KDE for any such work other than when developing/testing/using Fedora Electronic Laboratory (which is a considerable amount of time). But now, I am here playng around with DigiKam, gwenview, Dolphin etc etc.. Hats off KDE Team. Looks like its time to do a sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop too

Complete flickr set of Zurich, ETH and the KDE Party sessions