Historically Planet GNOME is the go-to place for those interested in following up with the work of GNOME community members, but with the rise of social media platforms and the downfall of blogs (and RSS feeds), one would think that feed aggregators would follow the path of losing popularity within our community too. Surprisingly that doesn’t seem to be the case for Planet GNOME.
In a poll recently made by Emmanuele Bassi in GNOME’s Discourse, the Planet was well ranked in the list of answers to the question “How do you find what people are working on?”. Conversations in the GNOME Hackers chat channel also led to this conclusion.
Given how useful Planet GNOME still is to our community, I think we should spend some time giving it some love and continue evolving the platform.
A historical “editorial” choice of Planet GNOME was to only include personal blogs. This was decided before I became an editor. The rationale was that this is a community space and by linking people to what they write, we are nurturing a community that puts people first. After all, GNOME is all about its people!
On the other hand, news.gnome.org was designed to be the go-to place for more formal/impersonal/institutional communication. In practice that didn’t work out so well as the website never reached as broad of an audience as Planet GNOME.
Also, as projects started to create their blogs (such as the Shell blog, GTK blog, etc…), people started to work around the editorial choice by adding multiple author feeds to the same blog. I think this seems to strike the right balance between personal and institutional communication.
So to help information spread broadly in our community, I (wearing my Editor hat) decided to lift this restriction. Now we started accepting project blogs too. Recently we added the Vala Blog, Accessibility Blog, and Flathub Blog. File an issue if you write for a GNOME related project blog that you wish to see on Planet GNOME.
While we are at it, interesting conversations are happening intending to improve the overall Planet GNOME experience and reach. Ideas and suggestions are being discussed in Discourse and you are welcome to join the conversation!
There’s no question that GNOME Settings is important to the overall GNOME experience and I feel flattered to share the responsibility of being one of its maintainers. I have been involved with Settings for almost a decade now but only in the last few months I have started to wear the general maintainer hat “officially”.
That’s why I am compelled to update our community on the current state of the project. Settings is also co-maintained by Robert Ancell who has been doing great work with reviews and also helping us improve our code readability/quality.
The last general update from Settings you might have heard of was Georges’ Maintainership of GNOME Settings Discourse post. Some of what’s written there still holds true: Settings is one of the largest modules in GNOME, and being this hub connecting the Shell, the settings daemons, network manager, portals, cups, etc… it needs more maintainers. It needs especially maintainers with domain expertise. We have a handful of active contributors doing great frontend/UI work, but we lack active contributors with expertise in the deep dungeons of networking or color management, for example.
To tackle this issue, one of my goals is to improve the developer experience in GNOME Settings to attract new contributors and to enable drive-by contributors to post changes without struggling much with the process. For that, I kickstarted our Developer documentation. It is in an early stage now and welcoming contributions.
I also have been invested in fixing some of our historical UI consistency problems. A lot has been done in the gnome-44 and gnome-45 cycles to adopt the latest design patterns from the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines with libadwaita and modern GTK. Alice Mikhaylenko and Christopher Davis did an outstanding job with the ports to modern Adwaita navigation widgets. We also gained a new “About” panel that can condense more information that is useful especially for debugging/supporting issues. There’s still work to be done on this front especially with certain views that are currently looking a bit out of place in comparison to modern views.
The new Privacy hub is a new “hub” panel introduced by Marco Melorio in gnome-45 that is our initial step towards reducing the overall number of panels.For GNOME 46 we want to introduce a new “System” hub panel, developed by our Google Summer of Code intern Gotam Gorabh, as well as introduce a new “Network & Internet” panel that is being already worked on by contributor Inam Ul Haq. These are two epics that involve reworking some complicated panels such as the Wifi/Network and User Accounts ones. These are panels that should also see a big frontend rework in the gnome-46 cycle and that I plan to work on myself.
Also a big thank you to Allan Day, Jakub Steiner, Tobias Bernard, Sam Hewitt, and other folks doing outstanding design and UX work for Settings.
If you want to get involved, feel free to join our Matrix chat channel and ask questions there. I also monitor the “settings” Discourse tag, where you can ask support questions and suggest features.
GNOME has a committee (Allan Day, Matthias Clasen and Sri Ramkrishna) that will triage projects before approval. More information about GNOME’s participation in Outreachy is available at Outreach/Outreachy – GNOME Wiki! .
If you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this thread or e-mail soc-admins@gnome.org, which is a private mailing list with the GNOME internship coordinators.
We are happy to announce that GNOME was assigned nine slots for Google Summer of Code projects this year!
GSoC is a program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. A number of long term GNOME developers are former GSoC interns, making the program a very valuable entry point for new members in our project.
In 2023 we will mentoring the following projects:
Project Title
Contributor
Assigned Mentor(s)
Make GNOME platform demos for Workbench
Akshay Warrier
Sonny Piers
Andy Holmes
Rust and GTK 4 Bustle Rewrite
Dave Patrick Caberto
Bilal Elmoussaoui
Maximilian
Create a New “System” panel in GNOME Settings
Gotam Gorabh
Felipe Borges
Implement backlog search in Polari IRC client
Gurmannat Sohal
Carlos Garnacho
Florian Müllner
Integrate GNOME Network Displays features into GNOME Settings
Pedro Sader Azevedo
Felipe Borges
Claudio Wunder
Jonas Ådahl
Anupam Kumar
GNOME Crosswords Anagram Support
Pratham Gupta
jrb
Make GNOME Platform Demos for Workbench
Sriyansh Shivam
Sonny Piers
Andy Holmes
Add Acrostic Puzzles to GNOME Crosswords
Tanmay Patil
jrb
Flatpak synching between machines
Tim FB
Rasmus Thomsen
As part of the contributor’s acceptance into GSoC they are expected to actively participate in the Community Bonding period (May 4 – 28). The Community Bonding period is intended to help prepare contributors to start contributing at full speed starting May 29.
The new contributors will soon get their blogs added to Planet GNOME making it easy for the GNOME community to get to know them and the projects that they will be working on.
We would like to also thank our mentors for supporting GSoC and helping new contributors enter our project.
We just wrapped up the 2023 edition of Linux App Summit here in Brno, and the conference was a blast! I was delighted to see so many friends and new people. I feel the future of Desktop Linux and our ecosystem is in very good hands!
For those that came to Brno and those participating virtually, I hope you also had a positive experience at the conference and at our city. If you missed the conference, you can watch the presentations in the LAS YouTube channel.
I hope to see you all soon at other events, such as GUADEC 2023.
Thank you!
Group photo of the 2023 Linux App Summit attendees
We are excited to have you visiting us in Brno, Czech Republic. The conference starts on Friday, April 21st, with a pre-registration social event. Saturday and Sunday are full of interesting talks, panels, workshops, and more!
We are glad to announce that once again the GNOME Foundation will be part of Google Summer of Code. We are interested in onboarding new contributors that are passionate about GNOME and motivated to become long term GNOME developers!
@Contributors interested in participating in GSoC with GNOME should visit https://gsoc.gnome.org for more information.
You can still submit project ideas until March 19th, when GSoC applicants are expected to submit their final proposals.
Important upcoming dates:
Now – March 19: Proactive GSoC contributors will reach out asking questions about your ideas list and receive feedback from us so they can start crafting their project proposals.
@Contributors make sure you research enough about the project and work towards making a small contribution. You should consider the proposals available in GNOME + GSoC | 2023 Project Ideas or propose your own project ideas as soon as possible in Teams / Engagement / Internship Project Ideas · GitLab 2
Make sure you approach potential mentors to move your idea towards an internship.
@Mentors, point contributors to gsoc.gnome.org for more information and be patient with their questions. Contributors are open to suggest new project proposals and you should indicate whether you’d be interested in mentoring those proposals and help them compose a project proposal that is realistic and benefits the project.
March 20 – April 4 18:00 UTC: GSoC contributors will submit their proposals through the program website.
April 4 – 26: We (admins and mentors) will review all submitted GSoC Contributor proposals and consider how many we want to select (based on how many committed mentors we have available). Admins and mentors will rank the contribution proposals.
April 27 18:00 UTC: Deadline to submit ranked slot requests (Org Admins enter requests)
April 27 – May 2: Google Program Admins review and assign org slots
May 3: Organizations receive notification of their accepted GSoC 2023 Contributors
May 4: Accepted GSoC 2023 GSoC Contributor projects are announced
May 4 – 28: Community Bonding Period
May 27: Deadline to notify Google Admins of an inactive GSoC Contributor that you wish to remove from the program
This was my first time attending FOSDEM and I had a lot of fun! It truly lived up to my expectations of full corridors, lots of known faces, and Delirium. 😀
During the conference days I was around the GNOME booth where interactions were great! Lots of people passing by and sharing kind words of appreciation to our desktop. We had lots of interest in GUADEC and LAS, as well as many people curious about the state of GNOME on mobile. The t-shirt/hoodie sales were a huge success! We were pretty much sold out by Sunday morning.
Special thanks to Kristi, Caroline, Rosanna, Sonny, David, Regina, Martin, Anisa, Rob, Zeeshan, and everyone that helped in the booth (I’m probably missing here people that were at the booth when I was elsewhere). Also, shoutout to the GNOME corridor gang!
I would like to thank David King, Dominika Vágnerová, and Petr Kovar for attending the hackfest, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring the space where the Settings-docs and the GTK hackfests took place.
This is a conference for the Desktop Linux community, GNOME, and KDE folk to discuss the future of our app ecosystem.
Brno is where me and a few other GNOMies live, and it is a tech hub in central Europe with lots of tech companies, open source communities, and universities. Brno hosted GUACEC in 2013, Akademy in 2014, and the LibreOffice Conference in 2016.
Getting here is easier by flying through the Vienna or Prague airports and taking a train to Brno. There are train and bus options from various other locations such as Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Bratislava. We prepared a page with all you need to know about the trip.
