UDS Monday Run-down!

Canonical graciously sponsored me as a community member to attend the Ubuntu Developer's Summit, and as the first day is over, I figured I should give a brief overview of the sesssions I attended.

Mark Shuttleworth opened the day, giving an overview of the general goals of Ubuntu followed by the specific goals for Jaunty. On the desktop the main goals seem to be a new notification system which looks very slick, and improved boot time. I was impressed with how down-to-earth he was, as well as being accessible throughout the day and popping into almost every session.

Next I went to the desktop experience session, which was mostly a presentation and feedback session for the new notification system targeted for Jaunty. Afterwards was a session about Launchpad, where Launchpad developers asked for input from users. As it turns out, almost every complaint and feature request made is apparently solved in 3.0. It sounds like it is going to be a very progressive release which will include an overhauled AJAX interface which is apparently much faster and easier to use, requiring less clicks and page loads. Additionally, signed PPAs should land in about two weeks, with the ability to have multiple PPAs per user coming eventually as well. Pretty exciting stuff for PPA users on both sides!

After lunch at the Googleplex I attended a session on improving 5-a-day, and we talked about how the program can be tweaked to encourage more consistent contributions to bug triaging. Afterwards there was a two-hour session on improving boot speed. Canonical is measuring boot time from the point where the GRUB count-down is done until the user is at a fully functional desktop with no disk I/O, and it sounds like the goal for Jaunty is to cut this time in half!

What did anyone else at UDS think of the sessions? If you aren't at UDS, what are your thoughts or questions?