[ubuntu-studio-devel] Updates from me

[Erich Eickmeyer]

Hi all,

I just thought I'd share some updates with what has been going on.

As many of you know, I was recently elected to the Ubuntu Community 
Council. This is going to be a huge benefit to Ubuntu Studio and other 
flavors as we now have someone on the council that comes at it with 
flavors, and specifically Ubuntu Studio, in mind.

Also, during the previous cycle, somehow I got the attention of the 
people behind the Kubuntu Focus project, which is the laptop with the 
Kubuntu brand on it. You can check it out at kfocus.org. It is one 
powerhouse of a machine! That said, they have reached-out to me and 
hired me to do their packaging for the machine-specific repositories 
that ship with the laptop for things such as power management and other 
optimizations, and to keep their "curated software" maintained in a 
backports repository of sorts since they stick with the LTS release. For 
now, it is a temporary, part-time position.

Additionally, part of that is keeping the Ubuntu Studio backports 
repository updated so that we're not duplicating effort. We really want 
to merge the synergies of the two projects. They want to be able to 
benefit from the work we've been doing with Studio via the Ubuntu Studio 
installer and add that as an official "expert solution" for multimedia 
types. So, this is a win-win because this merges the synergies of Ubuntu 
Studio with a hardware provider. I won't be paid to work on Ubuntu 
Studio *specifically* but it fits with the goals of the project for me 
to keep working on it.

Another major part of my job will be managing the user experience, and 
making it a great out-of-the-box Linux experience. That is coming along, 
and we're even developing a welcome app, which I helped design, with the 
working name "Center of Focus" that we hope to upstream into both Ubuntu 
Studio and Kubuntu since it will be easily configurable.

A future idea which we have discussed would be having Ubuntu Studio 
(22.04) installed by default on request. Like I said, this is one 
powerhouse of a machine, so it fits perfectly in our goals for Ubuntu 
Studio to be the best out-of-the-box content creation platform.

I just wanted to let you all know what was going on.  I'm really excited 
about this opportunity, and I encourage you to check out kfocus.org to 
see this beautiful machine!

That said, since it has become my day job, it is now my focus (no pun 
intended). I'm not leaving Ubuntu Studio, but I want to make you aware 
of my time commitment. As part of this, I'm reserving evenings and 
weekends for time with my family. I have no problem answering questions 
via IRC/Matrix, but if I don't respond on the weekends, just know that 
this is why.

Thanks for all you are doing!

-- 
Erich Eickmeyer
Project Leader     Ubuntu Studio
Council Member     Ubuntu Community Council