Month: December 2019

I am frequently asked if there’s any point in the desktop anymore. With the rise of cloud services, it’s easy to wonder whether there is a need. I believe that a free software desktop system is more important than ever.

GNOME creates an entire desktop environment that is beautifully designed and simple to use. We do this to ensure user freedoms. It is this empowerment of end users – acknowledging their right to control their own computing – that drives me forward.

The intention behind making free software is important, but irrelevant if the reality is that users cannot make use of those freedoms. When fewer than 0.5% of the world’s population can code, the chance of someone being able to modify their own desktop, or pay someone to do so, is vanishingly small. It is our responsibility, as technologists, a community, and a foundation, to provide to put the user first. Software must be built for everyone, and that’s what we are doing.

It is not enough for software to be free of charge, or even available under an open source license, if your data is being sent to third parties in attempts at monetization. It’s not enough if it is still necessary to have a fast, expensive internet connection to get the latest upgrades or access to files. It’s not enough if you need accessibility features that are under developed or unavailable. We see these situations as unacceptable and are working to change them.

Over the last year, we’ve grown from two full time, and one part time, employees to seven. Two more will be joining us shortly. This is to provide the support to enable the GNOME desktop to be what we need it to be. We will be launching a renewed focus on accessibility. We’re introducing out Coding Education Challenge – to make it easier for people to contribute to GNOME and free and open source software, regardless of background. We will do all of this while driving innovation and continuing to update our software based on solid user testing.

To do this, we need your help. We rely on individual donors to help support us. Help us bring the user freedoms to millions more people by joining Friends of GNOME today.

We recommend a donation of $25/month ($5/month for students). These donations support our staff, programs, and the ongoing development of the GNOME desktop environment and other software in the GNOME ecosystem.

With your help and support we’ll continue to develop world class free software and bring user freedom into the hands of every user.

Sincerely,
Neil McGovern
Executive Director
GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Project is built by a vibrant community and supported by the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity registered in California (USA). The GNOME community has spent more than 20 years creating a desktop environment designed for the user. We‘re asking you to become Friend of GNOME, with a recommended donation of $25/month ($5/month for students). We’re working to have 100 new Friends of GNOME join by January 6, 2020.

GNOME is about so much more than a desktop environment. In addition to the eponymous GNOME desktop, we work on projects like GStreamer, GTK, and Flatpak. We have a mostly complete list of technologies you can read on our web site. While the Foundation largely works on support, we also do development and outreach for GTK and GNOME core application development platform.

In addition to routine, and some not so routine, fixes, Emmanuele Bassi, GTK Core Developer, led development initiatives across the GNOME ecosystem. A far from complete list of work includes:

• reliability and usability of continuous integration (CI) for Glib and GTK;
• completed constraints layout work for GTK4;
• progress on the animation framework API for GTK, a necessary step for the GTK 4 release; and
• reviewing contributions and closing of numerous bugs.

Emmanuele mentored Ravgeet Dhillon in Google Summer of Code working on updates to the GTK web site. Additionally, Xiang Fan worked on GTK 4 Rust bindings.

Additionally, Emmanuele worked on the migration of the various GTK mailing lists to the new Discourse support forum.

We are already working on projects for 2020. Notably, there will be a hackfest in Brussels before FOSDEM, focused on GTK4, serving as a checkpoint for the 2020 release and accessibility (a11y).

A11y work is very important to us at the GNOME Foundation. We believe software needs to be for everyone, which means it needs to work for people who have physical disabilities, including those who are blind. In general, we plan to do a major a11y overhaul in 2020, focusing on developing our Accessibility Tool Kit (ATK). We are auditing what exists right now, and are currently seeking expert help with this. We hope to partner with other projects, to come together to create a11y support that rivals that of proprietary options.

In order to push these projects forward, we need your help. Please consider becoming a Friend of GNOME in order to support our work on new accessibility development, community building around a11y, and getting GTK 4 out the door.

The GNOME project is built by a vibrant community and supported by the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity registered in California (USA). The GNOME community has spent more than 20 years creating a free desktop environment designed for the user. We‘re asking you to join us by becoming Friend of GNOME.

The GNOME Foundation manages the technical infrastructure powering GNOME projects. Our Infrastructure Team is led by Andrea Veri and also includes Bartłomiej Piotrowski, working in devops and systems engineering. While Andrea has been with the Foundation for some time, Bart was hired in 2019.

Building and maintaining infrastructure for the GNOME project is one of the many activities of the GNOME Foundation, and it’s one of the most important. Building software like the GNOME desktop environment requires a lot of technical support, including managing servers and providing collaboration tools. Since GNOME is focused on being a self-sustaining community, we look as much as possible to managing our own services and software, and making sure it is free and open source.

The GNOME Infrastructure Team currently supports a total of 34 virtual machines hosted on a total of eight bare metal nodes. These virtual machines allow us to run services like the Openshift Container Platform (OSCP), which provides self-service access to the community to run any of their workflows on an automated and containarized fashion.

GNOME is build using self-hosted FOSS. We collaboratively build GNOME using a GitLab instance, which has a total of 15k accounts. We do shared storage using NextCloud. Community discussion is handled over Mailman, Discourse, and MoinMoin. We are currently using Indico and Connfa for our event planning and management.

There are other community-focused services as well, including:

• • internationalization services including localized home pages and translation toolings;
  • mail services for staff and community members;
  • staff mail endpoint for all the GNOME employees and contractors to store their mails on a supported hosting;
  • an IDM solution with more than 2.5k accounts, mirroring infrastructure for the GNOME sources to be available to a place that is closest to where you live for fastest download speeds;
  • Cachet for a dynamically updated Infrastructure Status page; and
  • a Surveys system and several app migrations from virtual machines into containers with a major improvement over maintainability, performance and budget that allowed us to retire unnecessary hypervisors and reduce the costs for the hardware renewals; and
  • a list of tools we offer to the community that keeps increasing year over year.

Additionally, the GNOME builders for the CI/CD processes were fully automated allowing the team to save time putting the system into service whenever a new builder is being donated to the GNOME Foundation.

We have a lot planned for the future. In particular we‘ll be focusing on migrating additional virtual machines into containers on OSCP. The idea is to consolidate and simplify the existing infrastructure even further to reduce maintenance and costs but at the same time offer the community the toolings they need in order for the GNOME Project to be successful as a whole.

We’re asking you to help us to help make the GNOME Project successful becoming a Friend of GNOME. By supporting the Foundation, you’re helping us to provide these necessary resources to the GNOME community, as well as expand our offerings to better meet the growing needs of the Project.

Everything the GNOME Foundation does is for the GNOME community. By supporting us, you’re supporting a global community looking to serve everyone, regardless of geography or language. Join us in working towards a brighter future for GNOME by becoming a Friend of GNOME today.

Photo by The National Archives (UK) is licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 License.