This year, the Linux App Summit was held in Barcelona, Spain, which is just a few hours away from Montpellier so there was no way I wouldn't attend it!

There I've been able to talk about how I helped porting GNOME to mobile devices, and I demoed it on a Librem 5 devkit in the corridors.

In the corridors, I had an impromptu demo of some GTK-based point-and-click game developed by Endless, it was looking super slick! I want to know more about it. 😄 I've also been able to try the elementary app launcher menu which recently picked Alexander Mikhaylenko's HdyPaginator widget, and I want more gestures everywhere in GNOME now!

There I met old pals and made new ones, the location was great, and the games on Thursday night were super fun! We can't overestimate the importance of these bonding events when you meet your community and people you work with only a few times a year, at best.

Photo courtesy of Sriram Ramkrishna

Photo courtesy of Julita Inca Chiroque

Photo courtesy of Javier Jardón

Also, Nuritzi and Robin organized a mugshot shooting session, it was a lot of fun and I'm defintely going to use these portraits, thanks a lot you two! 😁

Unfortunately I had to leave Barcelona on the last day and head to Toulouse to attend Capitole du Libre. There I helped my colleague François hold the Purism booth and I gave the same talk I did at GUADEC, but in French. I love these kind of free software conventions, you meet lots of end users with varying degrees of tech-savviness, it helps a lot to keep your feet on the ground when developing. On the booth we demoed the Librem 5 devkit, the excitement was very high!

Photos courtesy of Photo7

I also met David Revoy again, I love his works since many years already as I remember using some of his art as wallpaper as far back as 2012! So I'll let you imagine how happy I was to briefly meet him again, especially since he signed my 3rd tome of Pepper et Carrot with Carrot using a Librem 5! 📱️😺️

After this tour in the Occitano-Romance regions, I went back home in Montpellier.

As a sidenote, traveling was pretty interesting: all my trains were cancelled! This is caused by the foundations of some tracks being destroyed by a recent flood between Béziers (yeah, like the curves) and Agde (yeah, like the Cap). These floods are very common in my place, actually way more common than snow, we cope better with them than with snow but their destructive power is nonetheless great. Luckily for me, most of my trains got replaced, and for the only one which wasn't (Toulouse–Montpellier) I was lucky to have pals who were doing that exact trip by car the same day.

P.S.: Thanks for the torró, it was very good. 😋