In October 2024 some members of our community gathered in Medelin, Colombia, for another edition of GNOME Latam. Some of us joined remotely for a schedule packed with talks about GNOME and its ecosystem.
The talks, in Spanish and Portuguese, are now published on YouTube. Check it out!
It is that time of the year again when we start gathering ideas and mentors for Google Summer Code.
@Mentors, please submit new proposals in our Project ideas GitLab repository before the end of January.
Proposals will be reviewed by the GNOME GSoC Admins and posted in https://gsoc.gnome.org/2025 when approved.
If you have any doubts, please don’t hesitate to contact the GNOME Internship Committee.
We are excited to announce that the GNOME Foundation is sponsoring an Outreachy internship for the December-March round!
The intern will work with mentor Federico Mena Quintero on the project, “Implement the SVG2 text layout algorithm in librsvg.”
The intern’s blog will soon be added to Planet GNOME, where you can follow their project updates and learn more about them. Stay tuned!
While cutting the 47.2 release earlier today, I couldn’t help but reflect on everything we’ve accomplished this cycle. But instead of just listing code changes, I want to use this opportunity to give credit where it’s due, because to me, software is about people!
Much of what we have achieved this cycle is thanks to the dedication of passionate volunteer contributors such as Matthijs Velsink, Automeris Naranja, Hari Rana, Alice Mikhaylenko, Andy Holmes, Adrian Vovk, Corey Berla, Joan Torres, Joshua, Adrien Plazas, Jamie Murphy, and many others. I’m also deeply grateful to the translation teams for making GNOME accessible in so many different languages.
The GNOME Design team has been invaluable throughout this cycle. A big thank you to Allan Day, Jakub Steiner, Sam Hewitt, and Jamie Gravendeel, for their essential contributions.
Special thanks to Matthijs Velsink for taking on the challenging role of co-maintaining Settings with me. I couldn’t manage it without Matthijs’ outstanding contributions to fixes, features, and reviews. We’re lucky to have him as part of the project.
Release 47 holds extra significance for me. Wearing my downstream hat, I can share (it’s no secret) that the upcoming RHEL 10 Workstation will primarily feature GNOME 47 components. Building a solid upstream foundation for this version has been one of my top priorities, and I’m happy with the results.
Thanks to the evolution of libadwaita, we’ve been able to port many of our custom widgets to modern libadwaita ones. This transition enhances consistency across the desktop, improves accessibility, and ensures better responsiveness on screens of various sizes. A big shoutout to the incredible folks working on libadwaita for making this possible!
With Libadwaita we added Accent Color settings, allowing customizing our default blue accent color throughout the GNOME app ecosystem. Personally, I’ve been rocking the purple accent color on my desktop. 🙂
We also revisited the interface for adding local and enterprise user accounts, improving it with libadwaita widgets, a new password and username feedback widget, and addressing some technical debt along the way. Speaking of interface modernization, we’ve also revamped several UIs in the Printing settings.
Over time, some of our UIs have evolved at different paces, often leaving us with interfaces in transitional states and UX inconsistencies. A common example was nested dialogs, where a button within a dialog could open yet another dialog. To address this, many top-level dialogs have been converted into subpages using libadwaita’s AdwNavigationView, resulting in a smoother browsing experience.
We continually refine the settings texts and descriptions to align more closely with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Many settings have also been reworded to improve clarity and discoverability too.
There’s so much more that happened this cycle, including a lot of performance improvements, bug fixes, and various tweaks. You can find more changes listed on the ‘Version History’ dialog in GNOME Software.
We’re always looking for contributors, and there are many ways you can help improve GNOME Settings. Visit apps.gnome.org/Settings to learn how to get started.
GNOME is interested in participating in the Outreachy December-March cohort, and while we already have a few great projects, we are looking for experienced mentors with a couple more project ideas. Hurry up, we have until September 11 to conclude our list of ideas.
Please, submit project ideas on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/internship/project-ideas
Feel free to message us on #internships:gnome.org (matrix) if you have any doubts.
For the past nine years, I’ve been actively involved in our internship initiatives with Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. As an alumnus of these programs, I firmly believe they are great ways to onboard new contributors to GNOME and help students start a career in open-source software.
However, as my work responsibilities have grown and I’ve started some personal (non-software) projects, I’ve found myself with less time and energy for this type of contribution.
I’ve been discussing this with key people over the past year, and I plan to stay around to hand over responsibilities to other members of the Internship Committee. I will continue helping manage things for 2024, but I won’t be directly involved beyond that.
If you’re interested in helping with these activities, please reach out to the GNOME Internship Committee.
Some GNOME websites are getting modernized and simplified, but Planet GNOME has fallen behind. Not anymore. I started a prototype for a Python script to publish Planet GNOME with GitLab Pages/CI.
As Planet GNOME Editor, I am often asked to look for blog and syndication issues I couldn’t really address due to limited server-side access. With this, debugging indexing issues should be easier as it is just about looking at the CI job output.
Also, the Planet website is perceived as messy and outdated. So this work allowed Jakub Steiner to quickly jump in and restyle the page from a clean state.
Try it live at https://felipeborges.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/planet.gnome.org and let me know what you think. Keep in mind this is a proof of concept. Tips, feedback, and contributions are welcome in the project repo.
This still doesn’t produce the global Planet rss feed, just the webpage, but that’s in my TODO list too.
P.S.: I know feed readers/parsers can over-request rss/atom feeds. So I plan to cache data and use metadata to avoid redundant downloads before this is even considered as a replacement for the current Planet implementation. No worries. 😉
We are happy to announce that GNOME is sponsoring two Outreachy internship projects for the May-August 2024 Outreachy internship round where they will be conducting a series of short user research exercises, using a mix of research methods.
Udo Ijibike and Tamnjong Larry Tabeh will be working with mentors Allan Day and Aryan Kaushik.
Stay tuned to Planet GNOME for future updates on the progress of this project!
We are happy to announce that GNOME was assigned eight 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 2024 we will mentoring the following projects:
As part of the contributor’s acceptance into GSoC they are expected to actively participate in the Community Bonding period (May 1 – 26). The Community Bonding period is intended to help prepare contributors to start contributing at full speed starting May 27.
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.
If you have any doubts, feel free to reply to this Discourse topic or message us privately at soc-admins@gnome.org
The Outreachy organizers have approved GNOME to participate in the current round of Outreachy!
The GNOME Foundation is interested in sponsoring 3 internship projects for the May to August cohort.
@mentors If you are interested in mentoring, please discuss project ideas in our Project Ideas repository.
@interns Initial applications for the Outreachy May 2024 to Aug 2024 internships are due on Jan 29 at 4pm UTC: https://www.outreachy.org/apply/