We’re moving forward with exciting new things for GTK, including completing the consistent layout manager for GTK 4. We’re working on an API to make creating custom layouts easier. Focusing on usability across machines, we’ve put a significant amount of work into memory usage, to help things run more smoothly on small and low-powered devices.
We’re using GNOME!
Flatpak.org was running on Google Analytics, but that is no more! We are now using GNOME Matomo.
Inclusion, Diversity, and GNOME
GNOME is launching a Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiative to help the community become even better. They are working on revamping some web pages, working on the wiki, and putting together some special workshops and events to help people find their places within the community.
Check out the Annual Report!
Thanks to contributors, the board, and staff, we have a beautiful annual report that highlights what happened during the 2018 fiscal year. You can read it online.
## Meet the GNOMEies
This month we highlighted Sriram Ramkrishna. known around free and open source software communities as Sri.
Thank you!
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Sriram Ramkrishna, frequently known as Sri, is perhaps GNOME’s oldest contributor. He’s been around the community for almost as long as it’s been around!
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
I’m one of the oldest members of GNOME having recently past my 50th birthday. I started in GNOME in late 1997, at the time I was a storage engineer working for Intel. I remember feeling amused when someone in GNOME heard my background and asked whether Intel was going to be involved. They weren’t, but it turns out they did later. In fact, it’s because of GNOME that my work life changed from being a simple engineer to a multi-faceted person with not just technical skills but soft skills.
I’m well known in a number of other communities — free software community primarily, but also corporate open source thanks working 20 years at Intel.
What’s your role within the GNOME community?
I primarily do engagement work — social media, public relations, and talks in the community. But I also try help solve specific problems within the project. One current project I’m working on is to help improve the GNOME extensions. I have an on-going project to help with developer documentation using HotDoc. That’s been somewhat lagged and I hope to find time to help lead that effort again.
Why did you get involved in GNOME?
Miguel was a charismatic leader, and attracted me that way. Plus I hate C++, and GNOME was C based. 😀 But more than that, GNOME was a project that if you think about it was audacious in its purpose. Building a desktop in 1997 around an operating system that was primitive in terms of user experience, tooling, and experience. I wanted to be part of that.
Why are you still involved with GNOME?
Because GNOME is always a forward thinking project. There is still a lot of exciting potential and it’s like we’re only now getting started. The past 20 years was all about getting to the stage so that we can start doing some real innovation. We’ve reached parity with OSX and Windows — mainstream desktops. But now we can leverage the power of ideas even further.
What are you working on now?
Well, right now I’m involved in building a market for Linux applications. It’s no more audacious than the concept of GNOME itself. Five years ago, I had this idea that now that we had come up with ubiquitous app technology, that we can start working on building models that allow for compensation for free software developers, application stores so that developers can know how popular their apps are, and build relationships with the users who use their applications. A lot of this is encapsulated in a conference called Libre Application Summit. We did two iterations of that, and this year we’re expanding the scope and changing the name. Linux Application Summit will be a joint collaboration with KDE and hopefully distros in the future to help create the conditions needed to build modern, useful applications on a free software platform.
What are you excited about right now — either in GNOME or free and open source software in general?
Other than the conference. I’m generally excited about where GNOME is going. I think we have challenges to overcome and I’m excited about overcoming those challenges. In the FOSS community in general, there are challenges with encroachment by big business who I think are still trying to figure out how to exploit the labor of developers and we should ever be vigilant that we keep things fair and balanced between all parties.
What is a major challenge you see for the future of GNOME?
I think for GNOME as a platform, our challenge is to make sure that we have relevant documentation for users and developers. If there is one effort that I wish we could all participate in, it is that. It comes down to how low the barrier of entry is. How one picks one platform over the other is almost always depends on how quickly you can put together an application. Building a library of code, videos, and documentation is what will make GNOME successful. The second thing is that projects like GNOME Builder will also be critical to our success. I’m excited by the idea that I can build an application and have it be easily distributed everywhere and I don’t have to use arcane tools to do it.
What do you think GNOME should focus on next?
Documentation I think is going to be important, building relationships with other organizations and a very active foundation that will put their resources into building a solid infrastructure. So it’s not just one thing, but many.
Over the past few months, we’ve been building up the Foundation‘s staff. In addition to executive director Neil McGovern and director of operations Rosanna Yuen, we‘re thrilled to welcome:
Emmanuele Bassi, GTK+ core developer
Molly de Blanc, Strategic initiatives manager
Bartłomiej Piotrowski, Devops/sysadmin
Kristi Progri, Programs coordinator
Andrea Veri, Systems administrator
The election for the 2019-2020 board of directors is going on right now!
Where have we been?
In April we visited FOSS North in Gothenburg, Sweden and Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington, USA. Our table at FOSS North was staffed by Kristi and Neil, and volunteers Bastian, Anisa and Stefano. GNOMEie Zeeshan Ali presented on open source geolocation. Molly and Sri were at LFNW, where Molly spoke about following through on a code of conduct. Kristi participated remotely in FLISOL. There were two hackfests in May, Rust+GNOME 2019 Hackfest#5 in Berlin and Gstreamer Spring Hackfest 2019 in Oslo. We’ll be in Portland, OR, USA in July for OSCON. After OSCON we‘ll be hosting a West Coast Hackfest, July 18th – 21st.
Matthias Clasen is enjoys spending time outdoors, having great hair, and working on GNOME Tool Kit (GTK).
What is your role within the GNOME community?
I have been involved GNOME for a long time. My first commits to GTK are from sometime around 2002. GTK is where I spend most of my development and project maintenance time. But I’ve been involved in many other parts of GNOME at one point or another, from GLib to GNOME Software.
Apart from writing code and fixing bugs, I am a member of the release team, and do a few of the GNOME releases every cycle. In recent years, I’ve often done the .0 stable releases.
Other affiliations you want to share?
In my day job, I manage the “GNOME” part of the Red Hat desktop team, which is an outstanding group of engineers. We juggle upstream work on GNOME and related projects with maintaining the workstation products in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora.
Why did you get involved in GNOME?
That is a tough question to answer — these things usually just happen, and we try to retroactively make sense of them. To give some answer: My first love in software was typography — I spent my university years in Germany happily doing math and TeX. At some point, I got interested in window managers, and trying to write a better menu system for fvwm is what created my first contact with GTK. And things just grew from there, with many lucky coincidences along the way, not the least of which was that I got a job in the Red Hat desktop team.
Why are you still involved with GNOME?
On the one hand, it is part of my job (and I am extremely lucky that it is). But, really, it is just a way of life. There are so many good friends and colleagues in the GNOME community that I can’t imagine not being involved in it anymore.
What are you working on right now?
It is always a mix of things that are going on at the same time. The big tasks are getting Fedora Silverblue ready for prime time and trying to push GTK4 over the finish line. But there are a whole lot of smaller things that take up some of my time. A few weeks ago, I took a day to write a Flatpak portal that lets applications update themselves. And last week I spent a day working with Behdad on pango (I still have a soft spot for typography) and wrote a post about it.
What are you excited about right now — either in GNOME or free and open source software in general?
I am feeling quite positive about Flatpak, and the opportunities it opens up for getting out of the “Linux distro” conversation. It is exciting to see many apps on flathub that I had no idea existed. And now it is just one click for me to try them out. Together with gitlab and its CI, flatpak has also changed the way we develop GNOME. It is like night and day, compared to a few years ago — things generally just build and work these day, and you can download flatpaks to try out branches — it is fantastic.
What is a major challenge you see for the future of GNOME?
I think it is a challenge to teach generations the value of having a local computing device (e.g. your laptop) that is powerful and accessible enough to let you explore and build things. Between phones and the online world, there is a risk that we lose that important aspect of the freedom to tinker an explore — you don’t compile things on your phone, and you can’t reboot the cloud…
What do you think GNOME should focus on next?
I have a hard time answering this, because GNOME is thousands of individuals, who all have their own motivations and goals, not a monolithic block that can be turned in a different direction with a quick command. I think the work Endless has been doing for bringing computers (and GNOME) to people in the developing world and to young people is very relevant for the long-term future of the project, and we should support them.
What should we have asked you about that we didn‘t?
You could have asked me about my kids and my cats.
My kids are 21 and 19, and in college. Thankfully, they are both at home for the summer, so we can share the cooking and do some hiking and kayaking together.
The cats are not in college.
A lovely leaf Matthias found while hiking in the White Mountains.
I had the pleasure of coordinating GNOME and LibreOffice presence at Özgür Yazılım ve Linux Günleri (Free Software and Linux Days) 2018 in Istanbul, which took place between May 12 – May 13 in Bilgi University’s santralIstanbul campus. Here, I’ll try to share the GNOME part of the picture.
A view from the entrance of the event building
I am back at home after the Free Software and Linux Days 2018 in İstanbul. It was a small and cozy event. The number of attendees was lower than the previous years, but on the plus side, we had more time for each visitor. It was also a good opportunity to break the ice between different segments of the Turkish Free Software community.
We had a nice booth, jointly run by GNOME Turkey ad LibreOffice Turkey community members, next to the Pardus booth. We gave out stickers to the visitors, answered their questions about GNOME, LibreOffice, and Free/Libre Software in general. Community members also had a lot of time to chat, and to discuss the current situation and the future of our community in Turkey.
GNOME and LibreOffice booths
We also had two GNOME related presentation/seminar sessions:
Özgür Yazılımları Türkçe Konuşturmak (Making Free Software Talk Turkish), by Muhammet Kara
GNOME Recipe Uygulaması (The GNOME Recipe Application), by Emel Elvin Yıldız
And we now have all materials to set up a complete GNOME booth for any upcoming event in Turkey (thanks to The GNOME Foundation for funding the booth stuff).
Many thanks to all the visitors, attendees, and the organizers of the event! If you’re a GNOME user and you want to help promote it in your local region, consider joining the engagement team.
Had the pleasure to attend the GStramer Spring Hackfest taking place in Lund Sweden May 6 – May 4, here follow some reflections.
There is likely no overstatement that multimedia development is probably one of the more complex areas of software development so to be present while what must be some of the more competent in the domain hacking was quite an experience.
The atmosphere was intense focused, it almost felt like you could feel vibrations in the air.
Nirbheek and people busy hacking
Considered it good that many of the participants had an affection towards
GNOME (something to be for grateful/appreciative for).
Would be positive to attend a future GSteamer Hackfest.
Thanks to the local company Axis who provided the venue.
*The GNOME/GStreamer relationship is something to care about.
*There is no overstatement that the GStreamer community is a very knowledge & competent group of people which makes the alignment with GNOME valuable.
We have this week had the pleasure to interview Tanu Kaskinen about his work as PulseAudio maintainer
Do you want to introduce yourself?
Hello, my name is Tanu Kaskinen and I’m a PulseAudio maintainer (and also involved in the OpenEmbedded project a little bit). I spent my childhood in Järvenpää, Finland, and moved to Tampere when I started my software engineering studies at Tampere University of Technology. I’ve been living here ever since (13 years, if my calculations are correct).
How did you become involved with PulseAudio and why do you think its’ an important project?
At a time (2007, I think) I had a MIDI keyboard, and I wanted to play along while listening to music in Rhythmbox. That required running software synthesizers with JACK, but I couldn’t make Rhythmbox work properly with JACK. PulseAudio seemed like the future of desktop audio, and Rhythmbox certainly worked with PulseAudio. There was a PulseAudio module for bridging to JACK, but that was glitchy, so I decided to try to fix it (my first open source code contribution attempt!). In the end my fix was not needed after Lennart rewrote big parts of the PulseAudio core.
Why is PulseAudio important? Well, you need some sound server to manage application streams, be that dmix (in ALSA), JACK or PulseAudio. Having an intermediary between the applications and the kernel is required for a lot of flexibility that people expect from their systems.
What are some of the challenges about maintaining PulseAudio?
I guess all projects have their set of difficult bugs… In case of PulseAudio, hardware specific issues are quite common. Not having the hardware yourself is of course one problem when debugging, but even if the issue can be tracked down to a clear misbehaviour in the kernel driver, the bug may be left unfixed, because I have never learned to work with kernel code, and the ALSA developers may ignore the bug report (I don’t really blame them, I believe ALSA is understaffed too).
Any interesting features that are being worked on right now?
Nothing earth-shattering comes to mind, but here are things that I’m personally excited about: Georg Chini has been working on a long-standing bluetooth bug about bad A/V sync when watching videos.
I believe the Intel HDMI LPE hardware is becoming pretty widespread on new computers, and the kernel driver for that has certain unusual behaviour that makes PulseAudio enter an infinite loop when the HDMI cable is not plugged in. I’m happy that it will be fixed in the upcoming release.
There have been various small tweaks to automatic routing in recent releases, and those are going to continue.
What keeps you involved in the PulseAudio community?
I feel a need to do something useful with my life, and maintaining PulseAudio fills that need quite nicely. It’s not always fun, but it’s not so un-fun either that I would feel compelled to quit. PulseAudio has been a significant part of my life for some 10 years, and at this point it’s a pretty big part of my identity.
Can you describe PulseAudio’s role/relevance in a desktop environment such as GNOME?
GNOME tries to make a computer easy to use, and things should “just work”. PulseAudio plays a big role in that when it comes to audio. Also, if the GNOME user interface designers or developers have a vision for how e.g. audio settings should be presented, they have to work within the capabilities of the sound server.
Are you yourself a GNOME user?
Yes I am! I started using Linux when Debian Woody was current, probably in 2003. I don’t remember how I initially chose GNOME, maybe just because it was the default? I’ve sticked with Debian and GNOME pretty much all this time .
Why are you doing a fundraiser?
Because I don’t want a real job 🙂 I like having complete control over how I spend my time, and even if I didn’t feel so strongly about that, not many companies are willing to pay just for PulseAudio maintenance anyway. (Perhaps the number of such companies is even zero, but to be honest I haven’t tried reaching out to Red Hat or similar.)
In 2015 I found myself having enough savings to last at least a few years if I quit from my day job, and so I did. I wanted to spend more time on PulseAudio, because there was a shortage of maintainer resources in the project . In 2016 I launched the Patreon campaign to slow down the rate at which my savings are drained, and this year I started a similar campaign on Liberapay.
Questions for fun
What is your favorite place on Earth?
Well, there’s a certain quiet spot on the shore of the Näsijärvi lake not too far from where I live. During summertime I sometimes go there to watch the sunset.
Favorite cake?
Hmm, I haven’t pondered this before, but I think the answer is the Swiss roll. Ideally with whipped cream and banana inside. I don’t know if I’ve ever eaten such Swiss roll, but I imagine that would be the optimal filling.
Thanks Tanu for taking time talking with us we wish you continued luck in your efforts!
To celebrate the successfully held GNOME Asia Summit 2017 in Chongqing, the Linux Story community saw the 3.28 release as a chance to promote GNOME and Open Source in China.
With its influence in many major cities of China, Linux Story called upon open source enthusiasts to gather in their local cities to hold a 10 cities get-together event to celebrate the new GNOME release.
A set of pictures from the events with pictures follow here to enjoy (received from Linux Story).
In Xian, a speech titled “A Brief History of GNOME” was presented, the presenter Ckj then showed new features of GNOME 3.28In Guangzhou, the party started with a demonstration of GNOME 3.28. Later Mr Li Ruibin, an experienced Linux user helped explain issues people face when using Linux and then introduced people to Flatpak.In Beijing, the party did not only offer a GNONME 3.28 demonstration, but also delicious pizzas by sponsors like SUSE and ZhongBiao Software.
In Yangzhou and in Shanghai the spotlight was on GNOME 3.28 demonstrations and the excitement was very high.
An excitement exciting gathering happened in the Mozilla sponsored community office place in Taiwan where apart from a demonstration of GNOME 3.28 Mr Zeng Zhengjia a local Translator shared a lot of his experience with translating earlier versions of GNOME. The picture tells a lot about the atmosphere.
We want to thank the Linux Story community for the initiative and wish them luck in their continued efforts. Initiatives like this are great to see.
Last month, we had the pleasure of interviewing Øyvind Kolås, aka “pippin,” about his work on GEGL — a fundamental technology enabling GIMP and GNOME Photos.
GIMP Stickers, CC-BY-SA Michael Natterer
This interview is part of a “Giving Spotlight” series we are doing on some long-time GNOME contributors who have fundraising campaigns. The goal is to help GNOME users understand the importance of the technologies, get to know the maintainers, and learn how to support them.
Without further ado, we invite you to get to know Øyvind and his work on GEGL!
The following interview was conducted over email.
Getting to know Øyvind
Where are you from and where are you based?
I’m from the town of Ørsta – in the end of a fjord in Norway, but since high-school I’ve been quite migratory. Studying fine art in Oslo and Spain, color science research at a color lab and lecturing multimedia CD-ROM authoring in south-eastern Norway, and working on GNOME technologies like Clutter and cairo for Opened Hand and Intel in London, followed by half a decade of low-budget backpacking. At the moment I am based in Norway – and try to keep in touch with a few people and places – among others England, Germany, and Spain.
Øyvind “pippin” Kolås, CC BY-NC-ND Ross Burton
What do you do and how does it relate to GNOME?
I like tinkering with code – frequently code that involves graphics or UI. This results in sometimes useful, at other times odd, but perhaps interesting, tools, infrastructure, or other software artifacts. Through the years and combined with other interests, this has resulted in contributions to cairo and Clutter, as well as being the maintainer of babl and GEGL, which provide pixel handling and processing machinery for GIMP 2.9, 2.10 and beyond.
How did you first get involved in GNOME?
I attended the second GUADEC which happend in Copenhagen in 2001. This was my first in-person meeting with the people behind nicknames in #gimp as well as meeting in-person GIMP developers and power users, and the wider community around it including the GNOME project.
Why is your fundraising campaign important?
I want GIMP to improve and continue being relevant in the future, as well as
having a powerful graph-based framework for other imaging tasks. I hope that my continued maintainership of babl/GEGL will enable many new and significant workflows in GIMP and related software, as well as provide a foundation for implementing and distributing experimental image processing filters.
Wilber Week 2017, a hackathon for GEGL and GIMP, CC-BY-SA Debarshi Ray
Getting to know GEGL
How did your project originate?
GEGL’s history starts in 1997 with Rythm and Hues studios, a Californian visual effects and animation company. They were experimenting with a 16bit/high bit depth fork of GIMP known as filmgimp/cinepaint. Rythm and Hues succeeded in making GIMP work on high bit depth images, but the internal architecture was found to be lacking – and they started GEGL as a more solid future basis for high bit depth non-destructive editing in GIMP. Their funding/management interest waned, and GEGL development went dormant. GIMP however continued considering GEGL to be its future core.
How did you start working on GEGL?
I’ve been making and using graphics-related software since the early ’90s. In 2003-2004 I made a video editor for my own use in a hobby collaboration music video/short film venture. This video editing project was discontinued and salvaged for spare parts, like babl and a large set of initial operations when I took up maintainership and development of GEGL.
What are some of the greatest challenges that you’ve faced along the way?
When people get to know that I am somehow involved in development of the GIMP project, they expect me to be in control of and responsible for how the UI currently is. I have removed some GIMP menu items in attempts to clean things up and reduce technical debt, but most improvements I can take credit for now, and in the future, are indirect, like how moving to GEGL enables higher bit depths and on-canvas preview instead of using postage stamp-sized previews in dialogs.
What are some of your greatest successes?
Bringing GEGL from a duke-nukem-forever state, where GIMP was waiting on GEGL for all future enhancements, to GEGL waiting for GIMP to adopt it. The current development series of GIMP (2.9.x) is close to be released as 2.10 which will be the new stable; it is a featureful version with feature parity with 2.8 but a new engine under the hood. I am looking forward to seeing where GIMP will take GEGL in the future.
What are you working on right now?
One of the things I am working on – and playing with – at the moment is experiments in color separation. I’m making algorithms that simulate the color mixing behavior of inks and paints. That might be useful in programs like GIMP for tasks ranging from soft-proofing spot-colors to preparing photos or designs for multi-color silk-screening, for instance for textiles.
Which projects depend on your project? What’s the impact so far?
There are GIMP and GNOME Photos, as well as imgflo, which is a visual front-end provided by the visual programming environment noflo. GEGL (and babl, a companion library), are designed to be generally useful and do not have any APIs that could only be considered useful for GIMP. GEGL itself also contains various example and experimental command line and graphical interfaces for image and video processing.
How can I get involved?
GEGL continues needing, and thankfully getting, contributions, new filters, fixes to old filters, improvements to infrastructure, improved translations, and documentation. Making more projects use GEGL is also a good way of attracting more contributors. With funds raised through Liberapay and Patreon, I find it easier to allocate time and energy towards making the contribution experience of others smoother.
And now a few questions just for fun…
What is your favorite place on Earth?
Tricky, I have traveled a lot and not found a single place that is a definitive favorite. Places I’ve found to be to my liking are near the equator and have little seasonal variation, as well as are sufficiently high altitude to cool down to a comfortable day high temperature of roughly 25 degrees Celsius.
Favorite ice cream?
Could I have two scoops in a waffle cone, one mango sorbet, one coconut please? 🙂
Finally, our classic question: what do you think cats dream about?
Some cats probably dream about being able to sneak through walls.
Øyvind Kolås, CC BY-NC-ND Ross Burton
Thank you, Øyvind, for your answers. We look forward to seeing your upcoming work on GEGL this year and beyond!
As the calendar year comes to an end, we’d like to thank everyone who contributed for the first time to a new project at GNOME. The list below includes people who made their first commit, contribution, or joined a GNOME global team.
Please join us in thanking these excellent newcomers!
Design Team
Kate Lassalle-Klein
Tobias Bernard
Engagement Team
Anna Yin
Biraj Karmaker
Julian Sparber
Michael Hall
Neil McGovern
Shirley
Umang Jain
Yunfeng He (Jim)
Builder
Anoop Chandu
Georg Vienna
Kritarth
Lucie Dvorakova
namanyadav12
Xiang Fan
Calendar
Abdullahi Usman
Abishek
Andrei Ceapa
Carlo Lobrano
George Willian Condomitti
Jente Hidskes
Joyjit Choudhury
Nidhi Gupta
Novi-Novi
Orkun Tezer
Valentin Negoescu
Yash Singh
Files (Nautilus)
Adrian Zatreanu
Cristian Nancu
Diana Grecu
Eduard Čuba
Evgeny Shulgin
Horia Ion
Jan Tojnar
Kartikeya Sharma
Robert Stanca
Tiberiu Lepadatu
Vyas Giridharan
Waqar Ahmed
Games
Mateusz Sieczko
Radhika Dua
RoubyPA
Maps
Anup Agarwal
Nayan Deshmukh
RyuzakiKK
Music
Abhinav Singh
Jean Felder
Sambhav Kothari
Suyash Garg
Photos
Ankriti Sachan
Kartikeya Sharma
Katarina Gresova
Rashi Sah
Saksham Bhalla
Scott Cohen
Shivam Tripathi
Polari
Alexander Alzate Olaya
Augusto Cesar
Mjash
Justyn Temme
Zandr Martin
General interest or not sure what to join? Browse our mailing lists and IRC channels to find groups and topics that interest you.
Thank you again to everyone who participated in GNOME, oldcomers and newcomers alike. GNOME exists because of you. Thanks for making 2017 another great year!
If you’re interested in making your first contribution to GNOME, we welcome you to join us! Here are some resources: