Jonni Bidwell meets Daniel Stone to find out what’s hot in the crazy world of Linux graphics right now.
Collabora’s Daniel Stone has spent nearly two decades hacking on the Linux graphics stack. A term that would send lesser men mad. But not Daniel. We caught up with the guru of pixel pushing in hip and tech-culture-steeped Shoreditch to talk Wayland, Atomic Modesetting and virtual reality. And to reminisce about sunny Melbourne.
Linux format: So they tell me you’ve been working on the Linux graphics stack for quite some time?
Daniel Stone: Yeah, I think I’ve been doing that for about 16 or 17 years now. I started out doing packages for Debian, and ended up at one of the colleges at Melbourne Uni. They needed a newer version of XFree86, so they asked me to arrange it. “How hard can this possibly be?”, I thought, and I just sort of got sucked in from there.
LXF: Where did your initial Linux interest come from?
DS: Misspent youth, really. I don’t know exactly. My dad was really interested in computers, and I was using KDE quite early on. It would’ve been around 2001 – I started with Slackware, but I distinctly remember staying up one night trying to get X to run. Then I moved to Red Hat and was amazed at how much easier it was.
LXF: I had the pleasure of meeting Juan and Berto from Igalia last year, and their story was quite inspiring. A few guys just out of uni, setting up a sort of one-stop open source shop in their hometown, and Igalia is now among the most prolific contributors to FOSS. How does Collabora’s story compare, and am I even pronouncing that right?
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