Episode: 1603
Title: HPR1603: GUADEC 2014: Matthew Garrett Interview
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1603/hpr1603.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:41:42

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It's Wednesday 24th on September 2014.
This is an HPR episode 163 entitled, Warmec 2014, Matthew Garrett Interview, and is part
of the series, Interviews.
It is posted my first time post to be frank, and is about 15 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to mail at LinuxOnext.net or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is I was able to ask Warmec keynote speaker, and free software activist Matthew
Garrett a few questions.
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Hi, and welcome to Hacker.com, my name is Toby Frank, I am one of the hosts of a podcast
in German called Linux Una Angst, which is Linux without fear in English, which I do
with my mate Pete from Strasbourg in France.
We've been doing this for all of six months now, and we try to attend Linux conferences
whenever we can, and this year the Guadek, the GNOME users and developers conference, was
held in our hometown Strasbourg.
So we thought that would be the ideal occasion to pop by and listen and talk to some non-developers
users, and it was very enlightening, and we will talk about it a little more in depth
in the next issue of our podcast, if you're a German speaker that is.
But there also was the keynote, and it was held by Matthew Garrett, a prominent figure
in the open source world, and I wanted to share this with you, because I did a brief
interview with him after the talk.
So very briefly for those who don't know him who's Matthew Garrett, he's a programmer
and a free software activist, and has been a contributor to the Debian project.
He has been a member of the Ubuntu Technical Board, and he's also worked for Red Hat
and for Canonical, by the way.
And for the two letters, he, among others, worked on the UEFI bootloader, or rather how
to be able to still install Linux on your system if you've got a computer that has
UEFI and Secure Boot that our friends at Microsoft have imposed on us, and I think he's
the man behind the Shim Bootloader, and for his work on the Secure Boot problem, he was
being awarded the 2013 free software award, currently works for a cloud computing platform,
and has always been a strong advocate of software freedom.
So let me briefly outline what Matthew said in his keynote before I play you the interview.
The title was Why Do We Desktop?
And he argued the way we use it has fundamentally changed in the last decades, from just displaying
several programs at once to web apps, deskslets, and social functions of the desktop.
And later on, somebody asked if developing a desktop was still relevant in the time of
tablets and mobile devices, outselling PCs, and this was Matthew's answer.
People still want to have a traditional desktop environment for many purposes.
And there is also the potential issue that, while desktop cells have declined, how much
that is because we're now at the point where every home already has probably at least one
desktop computer, and in many cases, two or more.
We perhaps got the point where the marketing sector is, in an extent, and the market's
already expanding as much as was previously.
People buying tablets, because they don't already have a tablet, people are not buying
their stops, but they already have a desktop.
And that's going to be effective here as well.
I don't think the depth of the desktop market is as drastic as some people believe.
I think it's going to continue to be relevant, so I think we need to continue to be relevant
with it.
Matthew also talked about the great plays of the desktop world, Google with Google Chrome
or Apple with its Mac interface, and that their goal is mainly to tie you into their
ecosystem to sell you their stuff.
Google Web Apps or iTunes for Apple.
Microsoft Window 8, he called a consistent UI across platforms, somewhat to my surprise,
over PC, tablet, phones, and everything.
And he used the term convergence here, without mentioning Ubuntu, who frequently used this
term at this point.
Later, he cited Ubuntu as a negative example for a distro that's trying to close that
system down, tying it into Amazon, for example, with their desktop.
According to Matthew, these are all missing the points.
Are there to sell products and tie users into their business model?
What Linux, and especially no needs, he argued, was security as a primary concern, not
just enough to thought, privacy, for example, with apps that use tour, free of corporate
control, open apps developed for the user.
And he said the desktop should be social, cited, no, as a friendly community, which I can
confirm from this guileg, focus on diversity also, which is a major strong point of known
community, and he asked who is the user, is it an everyday user, is it a developer, or
is it even a gamer, and his mantra actually was, we need to appeal to all.
So that I think sums up Matthew's keynote, one of the keynotes at Guarek 2014, and afterwards
I was able to ask him a few questions, here there are.
So Matthew, this was a very much sort of a declaration of really perspective and ideology
for known desktop, and maybe for Linux desktop in general, how, if you have to give a percentage,
how much are we already there do you think?
So building a desktop long meeting, something that respects users' freedom and their privacy
and their safety, is fundamentally impossible without having an entire free off-raising system
to build that one.
And the fact that we have that in the fall of the GNU user space in Linux kernel, means
that we've already got many of the codes we need.
There's plenty of work to do, but I'm saying we're most of the way there.
I think we can get to where we want to be in the rest of this small number of weeks.
But the case of Ubuntu is maybe an interesting case, because they were the most popular
Linux distribution.
We're getting a brand name out there that was started to be known, and started to be known,
I think.
But you seem to consider it more as going a bit to the dark side, I reckon.
I'd say that there are a lot of just the concerns about design decisions that we made within
Ubuntu that are not necessarily to use as benefits, because I only stayed there to benefit
canonical.
In a sense, I can see why, because obviously developing an operating system like Ubuntu
involves money, and they need to find a way to make money in order to continue funding
its development.
I think they've gone too far in the direction of sacrificing user privacy and user safety
in return for that.
I hope that they revisit that decision in future.
And you also said that you basically aim at all the users with the non-desk, the gamer,
the everyday user, and maybe the developer needs something very specific, isn't that too
big of a stretch?
I don't think so, because I think the majority of these users want the same fit, the majority
of the desktop functionality is identical for these people.
We can provide additional functionality that satisfies their needs without taking that
away from anybody else.
It's going to be something that's time-consuming to develop, where it needs to identify these
people's needs and ensure that we can satisfy them, but I don't see any fundamental reason
why this is impossible.
And the really everyday user that maybe, sometimes it seems to me, that's buying a PC like
that, buying a fridge, which is by certain function, and you expect it to function, and once
your operating system grows down, you have to buy a new computer, because you consider
it the same unit, and no one says, I could install Linux in that, could I install something
else in that?
What do you think?
So it's in the sense of, is that a problem?
How can we convert these people, convince them, try installing them, look at the non-desk
top, see those alternatives, when actually they consider maybe too much trouble, because
there was just something switching on, and what actually does the thing they want to do?
I think the Ubuntu demonstrated fairly well, as it was possible to produce an unskilled
users code to install on their computers.
We can probably go further, there are certain issues of modifications we can teach, to
make installers, to make it possible for users to do this with even less technical knowledge,
but I think these distributions have that mostly unskilled control.
Beyond that, I don't think we're at the point where it's a strong technical issue now,
or even a strong difficulty issue, but I think the problem is what people are not aware
of, this is an option, and that's really a word of mouth issue, it's a marketing issue.
You said evangelism, but is it also a thing of getting a brand out there?
Having a solid brand makes it a lot easier to have a consistent message, to go to people
and say, this is what we're doing, this is what we're going to be doing in the future,
this is why you should be part of what we're doing.
Okay, Matthew, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
Okay, so this was our brief look at Guarek, the keynote this year, and speaking Matthew
Garrett, I hope as I, you have enjoyed this and learned something.
If you want to know more, and you speak German, take a look at linuxonaangst.net, the address
will also be in the show notes.
If you want to send us reactions, you can do so at mail at linuxonaangst.net.
And thanks to Hacker Public Radio, and thanks to Matthew Garrett.
Take care.
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