Back in April I wrote a Trip Report of the last major Endless OS Beta release. It was fun! I use Endless OS every day and have a very soft spot for it after Product Managing it for a couple of rewarding yet high stress years. Now the team has released their first beta of the 3.9 release series. If I was still there this is the sort of thing the team would get in a blizzard of Google Docs and Phabricator tickets.

Endless have recently released the first beta of the 3.8 series for their Linux based operating system. As someone who used to work there in product, and is still friends with a number of Endless-ers I upgraded my personal machine and checked it out. This is a “trip report” of my notes and may be a little bitty but I hope it’s useful feedback for the developers and designers and maybe encourages a few other people to give Endless a go.

I was lucky enough to be sponsored by the GNOME Foundation to attend the 2019 Linux Application Summit, hosted in Barcelona between November 12th and 15th 2019. It was a great conference with a diverse crew of people who all care about making apps on Linux better. I particularly enjoyed Frank’s keynote on Linux apps from the perspective of Nextcloud, an Actual ISV. Also worth your time is Rob’s talk on how Flathub would like to help more developers earn money from their work; Adrien on GTK and scalable UIs for phones; Robin on tone of voice and copywriting; Emel on Product Management in the context of GNOME Recipes and Paul Brown on direct language and better communication.

The start of a new year often brings change. Our family has increased in size, which is very exciting. I’m also moving on from Endless and have a new job Managing Product at Lucid. I’m sad to be leaving my friends at Endless after a couple of delightful and very satisfying years but I’m also very pleased to be working with Jonty and Jono again. I still remain as emotionally invested in the GNOME and Flatpak communities as ever - I just won’t be paid to contribute, which is no bad thing for an open source project.

This year at GUADEC in Almería I was lucky enough to give a talk entitled “Product Management in Open Source”. I’ll give a text synopsis of the talk below but if you prefer you can watch the whole thing as delivered at the Internet Archive or have a look at the slides, which are entirely mysterious when viewed alone: The talk begins like so: I’m Nick Richards. I’ve been a GNOME User for 20 years and a contributor and Foundation Member - 10 years (off and on).