Saturday, May 15, 2010

UDS-Maverick recap

UDS-M is bittersweet. It is the last summit I attend due to additional work commitments that will remove me from Ubuntu development, but more significantly it is the first summit where the future gardeners, maintainers, and developers of the audio infrastructure in Ubuntu and derivatives gathered and discussed how we can drive user experience improvements. In fact, the phenomenal Amber Graner asked me a few questions to that end, and a few things that I neglected to mention are that:

* Canonical has some real rock stars ramping up enablement and proactive quirking efforts on the ALSA front, so Linux distributions will see significant improvement in vendor support for audio in the 12.04 LTS time frame;
* we might see a streamlined method of switching between PulseAudio and JACK via indicator-sound on the Ubuntu desktop;
* Maverick will see the complete removal of native OSS support from our linux packages with OSS proxy being used instead.

As always, we'll continue to apply stable release updates to supported releases (particularly the most current LTS), to address high profile bug reports against the audio stack, and to maintain helpful presences on the varied mailing lists.

It has been one heck of a five-year ride. Thanks for all the fish.