It's almost 2024, so everyone should harvest something in 2023 :)

  • In 2023, I have gone from being a pragmatic open-source software lover to a free software enthusiast. The ROM on my Android phone was switched from MIUI which is the stock firmware on my phone, to the AOSP-based crDroid. I was struggling to use as little proprietary software as possible both on my phone and PC, minimizing my dependence on proprietary network services.

  • In February, I joined the FSF by paying $5 membership fee on a monthly basis. When I discover a nice free software on Github, if the developer has set up Github Sponsor, I will probably financially support him/her (individual FOSS developers will be given $1 or $2 per month).

  • In March, I submitted my archlinuxcn maintainer application to @lilydjwg who is one of the founders of archlinuxcn via email, and became an archlinuxcn maintainer. In the following 9 months, I committed more than 900 times (initially I was unfamiliar with lilac hence made a few mistakes).

  • Due to the poor battery life and hardship of portability with the peripherals of ROG Zephyrus M16, I purchased a chromebook at the end of March. After trying ChromeOS for several hours, I flashed coreboot and installed Arch Linux on it (it's my first experience of an x86 PC with open-source UEFI firmware). Now I take this chromebook with me when I go out, which is very portable weighing 1.3 kg. Instead of turning it off, most of the time I close the lid to make it suspend.

  • In May, I found a Tauri-based and GPL-licensed translation application on Github (namely pot-desktop). Nonetheless, after installing it from AUR, I realized its Wayland support is inferior. Therefore, I gave feedback to the developer, and soon the Wayland support became immaculate. The updated version of pot-desktop added support for OCR and plugin functionality, thus I participated in the development of its plugins.

  • In June, I joined PLCT and worked as an openEuler packaging intern for 3 months, but I found this position was not suitable for me as I disliked openEuler which is totally a product of "Information Technology Application Innovation" in China. Furthermore, its init system, sysmaster, is entirely a pointless refactoring product of systemd.

  • In July, I participated in LLUG (Linux Lovers User Group) in Shanghai, and met several friends with whom I get acquainted in the Arch Linux Chinese Community. In a 5-minute lightning talk, I shared my experience from a Linux novice to an archlinuxcn maintainer.

  • In September, I attended the Software Freedom Day hosted by USTC (University of Science and Technology of China) online by means of Jitsi Meet, and delivered a speech centered around FOSS. During my presentation, I shared my experience in the open source community, introduced the notion of free software and recommended notable free software including Mastodon and Matrix. Additionally, I got to meet some free software enthusiasts in USTC.

  • Since the bug I reported to Ark (the archive software of KDE) in September was not fixed in several weeks, I took the initiative to fix it myself and submitted my first merge request to KDE in October. From then on, I have been learning Qt and Kirigami and trying to fix simple bugs in KDE software (not capable of fixing the complex ones at all yet)

  • Overall, I had some regrets but also quite a few gains in 2023. Hankering for a more wonderful 2024 :)

  • Last but not least, happy new year!