User:Mauriziogalli

Maurizio Galli (aka m4u)

Nationality: Swiss - Current Residence: Singapore

About me

Born in 1984 in Switzerland, I live in Singapore and I currently work at SUSE as a software engineer.

I like tinkering with Linux and gadgets which can be source of frustration in the family if I accidentally kill the internet connection. Usually I am far less destructive if I'm playing retro-games :-P

I also enjoy good wine, brandy and whiskey which have been part of my trade for a decade, before my passion for computers and Linux, led me to openSUSE and more recently SUSE.

My adventure with openSUSE

About four years ago I landed on a video praising Leap and Tumbleweed that made me want to give it a try. I was at first a bit uneasy due to the different defaults I was used to in other distros, but I then started hanging out in the Reddit and Discord openSUSE communities where I met great people who helped me learning the ropes and some time after I found myself giving tech support on the same platforms. The quality of Leap and Tumbleweed along with the great and friendly online community made me stick around and eventually become one of the moderators on various communication platforms such as Discord, Matrix and Telegram and Reddit.

In the openSUSE online communities, I witnessed how several devs were collaborating and doing the work for the project. This lead and motivated me to start contributing to openSUSE software myself. With some assistance I was able to learn RPM packaging and I eventually started submitting software to the official repos, until I have become one of the Xfce package maintainers in 2017.

In 2022 I was elected to be a member of the openSUSE Board and I served in this role till the end of my term in 2024.

openSUSE and Xfce

I'm a proud member of the openSUSE Project and the openSUSE Xfce Team, and as such my main involvement in the openSUSE project is as a developer and packager of the Xfce desktop environment. Other than the maintenance of the desktop, my main focus in this role has been to push for a modern look, as well as a lighter and simplified software selection, with the focus to polish the default experience for new users. This led to the creation of the Tumbleweed Live image and inclusion of Xfce in the Tumbleweed installer. Recently with Leap 15.3, Xfce was also introduced as option in the installer and live images were also created.

For Xfce upstream I've contributed a few patches and more recently I have been actively involved in the redesign and drawing of the application icons that were introduced in the 4.16 release. In addition I am also a member of the Shimmer Project, an unofficial Xfce side project that is home to the Greybird GTK theme and Elementary-Xfce Icon theme, that are default in openSUSE Xfce and Xubuntu.