Testimonials

Endorsements from GNOME users and deployments.

WARNING: this material is extremely out of date.

Junta de Andalucia and Extremadura

Q and A with Juan Conde, a director of the Guadalinex project:

• Are you happy with your choice of GNOME?
  • We took the choice for two main reasons, one was accessibility and the other was the fact that our neighbour region, and partners in the promotion of free software, Extremadura, had already chosen Gnome. We have had some trouble with some parts of Gnome in the past (I remenber some erratic behaviour of Gnome-system-tools and difficulties with the menus, but almost everything is going better) and the global experience is quite good.
• How have you found dealing with our community?
  • There has not been too much relation with the Gnome community, but we think it's time to cooperate tightly with Gnome, in particular as we are going to start a project to create a new screen reader (reusing as much as possible) for Gnome; I can tell you more if you are interested in this particular project.
• What's your opinion of the move to an Ubuntu base for the project?
  • Well... I was one of the proposers. I think it's a good choice for several reasons:
  • Stability. Now we live a very special live time for Debian, Sarge is stable and new; next year maybe there is a new stable version of Debian, or maybe not. Ubuntu is commited to have a new and stable version every 6 months.
  • Security patches. The same arguments; if you take Sarge today you have recent versions of applications and security updates at the same time, next year maybe you are forced to take Debian unstable as a base for having recent versions and you loose the security updates.
  • Translation. I understand there is a great translation effort arround Ubuntu, we can contribute and benefit from it.
  • Critical mass. Ubuntu seems to be a fast growing comunity and thats very interesting in order to movilize the hardware makers and get greater Hw support.
• how many computers are installed with Guadalinex?
  • In September, there will be some 200.000 officially installed computers in 543 of the some 4.000 public schools in Andalusia.

September 2011, Juan Conde, Chief Free Software Officer at the Junta de Andalucía said, “Guadalinex has been relying on GNOME since its very inception. We currently have 600.000 desktops deployed in publicly-funded schools, and are now working in a new corporate GNOME 3 based desktop called GECOS (Guadalinex Standard Corporate Edition) that is designed for the everyday tasks of civil servants. GNOME 3 has been a big change for Guadalinex and I am glad to see that GNOME 3.2 improves the CSS and extension support to allow for easy user interface changes. For a government, accessibility is a must and GNOME provides it like no other. Thanks GNOME.”

Dupedi

(cut slightly, because this was quite a long mail where we discussed some other things too)

• En français

Nous sommes en Debian Sarge et GNOME 2.6 et quelques postes en test sur 2.8.

Dans l'ensemble nous sommes très satisfait de Gnome...

Au début, il y a deux ans, j'avais de gros soucis, et 50 personnes vraiment pas contentes de quitter leurs habitudes. Maintenant, ils commencent à demander que je l'installe chez eux à la maison Et je suis certain que si je revenais à MS ils seraient fâché de changer leurs habitudes

...cela bouge dans le bon sens

• In English

We are using Debian Sarge and GNOME 2.6 with a few computers running 2.8.

On whole, we are very happy with GNOME...

In the beginning, 2 years ago, we had lots of problems, and 50 people who were really unhappy leaving the computer environment that they knew. Now, I am starting to get requests to install Linux on their home PCs. And I am sure that if we went back to Microsoft that people would be very annoyed to change.

...things are moving in the right direction.

Sao Paolo

We have started the Telecenters project in 2001, using dual boot Windows 2000/Conectiva Linux (which uses mainly the KDE Desktop). We were also using tabletop computers at the time. In 2002, third quarter, we have switched to Red Hat Linux with Gnome, and started studying how to start using thin clients in the Telecenters to reduce maintenance costs. As part of the public sector, we have an annual budget, so reducing maintenance costs means in fact opening more Tececenters.

We made very simple analysis at the time. Gnome at the time was just launching its 2.x series, it was beautiful, clean, lightweight and fast, but most important, it was the desktop project that had the most inertia at the time, people were very motivated. Free Software is an ever evolving process, looking just at the state things are at any one time is just seeing part of the way things are. We must always look at the future, if Gnome was so good then, in the future it promised to be much better.

The Telecenters fight against the digital divide. We had to have the largest possible number of applications installed in the computers, and select a few for the Desktop. In the beggining we already had the demand, and were struggling to learn the thin client concept. So we just made basic customizations, deploying the first version of our thin client Telecenters at the end of 2002 (using Debian/Gnome).

During 2003 we made a much better implementation of the same thin client solution which we deployed in the beginning of 2004 (Debian/Gnome 2.2/Kernel 2.4 patched with fairsched). We hired some more developers then, traced a roadmap for our thin client "distribution" and began development of what we called Sacix, Tamandua version.

The project reaction was very good. People in the Telecenters had never or rarely used computers before, and did not bring any preconceived ideas of operating environments, and that helped us a bit. In the end, good desktops are very similar, and Gnome proved to be a very good desktop which, amazingly, evolved a lot since version 2.0.

The main problems with thin clients are sound, storage and other devices, which for the server are remote. Each user has only one soundcard, floppy device, cd-rom associated with his computer. From the server perspective, there are many of these devices, this situation has to be masked for the thin client user.

We are managing 122 Telecenters by now. São Paulo is a very large city with a population of about 11 million people. Along with the surrounding urban area, the population gets to 16 million people. So we divided the city in 15 regions, each with 8 to 12 Telecenters, and hired for each region a technician who configures, report problems and support the Telecenters in his region, in rounds. This technician usually lives near the area where he works, which is a plus.

I personally like Gnome's 6 months release period. This continuously signal users that the project *is* moving forward. We haven't been able to cope with this speed, but it is nice to follow what is being developed and to plan to implement it in the next version of Sacix. Also, with a 6 months cycle, we are never using a very ancient Gnome in the Telecenters, we usualy have a 6 months to one year old version.

GNOME Desktop reader

Ref: GNOME LiveCD passes 5000 downloads

I just installed debian w/ Gnome on my friends' machine, GNOME is great, i personally hated all sorts of "Ease of use" features like not being able to tweak GNOME so easily because of the dumbed-down setting menus and stuff, plus the spatial ting of course, but my friend (to my GREAT surprise) liked its uncluttered user friendlyness, so great work guys, really, he is the kind of user to appeal to (not me, who would be happy to use a console all his life :D).