Press Release – GNOME Foundation

GNOME Has a New Infrastructure Partner: Welcome AWS!

This post was contributed by Andrea Veri from the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME has historically hosted its infrastructure on premises. That changed with an AWS Open Source Credits program sponsorship which has allowed our team of two SREs to migrate the majority of the workloads to the cloud and turn the existing OpenShift environment into a fully scalable and fault tolerant one thanks to the infrastructure provided by AWS. By moving to the cloud, we have dramatically reduced the maintenance burden, achieved lower latency for our users and contributors and increased security through better access controls.

Our original infrastructure did not account for the exponential growth that GNOME has seen in its contributors and userbase over the past 4-5 years thanks to the introduction of GNOME Circle. GNOME Circle is composed of applications that are not part of core GNOME but are meant to extend the ecosystem without being bound to the stricter core policies and release schedules. Contributions on these projects also make contributors eligible for GNOME Foundation membership and potentially allow them to receive direct commit access to GitLab in case the contributions are consistent over a long period of time in order to gain more trust from the community. GNOME recently migrated to GitLab, away from cgit and Bugzilla.

In this post, we’d like to share some of the improvements we’ve made as a result of our migration to the cloud.

A history of network and storage challenges

In 2020, we documented our main architectural challenges:

Our infrastructure was built on OpenShift in a hyperconverged setup, using OpenShift Data Foundations (ODF), running Ceph and Rook behind the scenes. Our control plane and workloads were also running on top of the same nodes.
Because GNOME historically did not have an L3 network and generally had no plans to upgrade the underlying network equipment and/or invest time in refactoring it, we would have to run our gateway using a plain Linux VM with all the associated consequences.
We also wanted to make use of an external Ceph cluster with slower storage, but this was not supported in ODF and required extra glue to make it work.
No changes were planned on the networking equipment side to make links redundant. That meant a code upgrade on switches would have required full service downtime.
We had to work with with Dell support for every broken hardware component, which added further toil.
With the GNOME user and contributor base always increasing, we never really had a good way to scale our compute resources due to budget constraints.

Cloud migration improvements

In 2024, during a hardware refresh cycle, we started evaluating the idea of migrating to the public cloud. We have been participating in the AWS Open Source Credits program for many years and received sponsorship for a set of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets that we use widely across GNOME services. Based on our previous experience with the program and the people running it, we decided to request sponsorship from AWS for the entire infrastructure, which was kindly accepted.

I believe it’s crucial to understand how AWS resolved the architectural challenges we had as a small SRE team (just two engineers!). Most importantly, the move dramatically reduced the maintenance toil we had:

Using AWS’s provided software-defined networking services, we no longer have to rely on an external team to apply changes to the underlying networking layout. This also gave us a way to use a redundant gateway and NAT without having to expose worker nodes to the internet.
We now use AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) instances (classic load balancers are the only type supported by OpenShift for now) as a traffic ingress for our OpenShift cluster. This reduces latency as we now operate within the same VPC instead of relying on an external load balancing provider. This also comes with the ability to have access to the security group APIs which we can use to dynamically add IP addresses. This is critical when we have individuals or organizations abusing specific GNOME services with thousands of queries per minute.
We also use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) via the OpenShift CSI driver. This allows us to avoid having to manage a Ceph cluster, which is a major win in terms of maintenance and operability.
With AWS Graviton instances, we now have access to ARM64 machines, which we heavily leverage as they’re generally cheaper than their Intel counterparts.
Given how extensively we use Amazon S3 across the infrastructure, we were able to reduce latency and costs due to the use of internal VPC S3 endpoints.
We took advantage of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide granular access to AWS services, giving us the possibility to allow individual contributors to manage a limited set of resources without requiring higher privileges.
We now have complete hardware management abstraction, which is vital for a team of only two engineers who are trying to avoid any additional maintenance burden.

Thank you, AWS!

I’d like to thank AWS for their sponsorship and the massive opportunity they are giving to the GNOME Infrastructure to provide resilient, stable and highly available workloads to GNOME’s users and contributors across the globe.

Introducing GNOME 47

The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 47, ‘Denver’.

This release brings support for customizable Accent Colors, improved support for small screens, persistent remote sessions, and new-style dialog windows. Like many other core apps, Files has received improvements and now also used for file open and save dialogs. Once again, a whole slew of new apps have joined the GNOME Circle initiative: find GNOME apps for anything from currency conversion to resource monitoring.

To learn more about the changes in GNOME 47 you can read the release notes:

GNOME release notes

You can also watch our release video.

GNOME release video 1

GNOME 47 will be available shortly in many distributions, such as Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.10. If you want to try it today, you can look for their beta releases, which will be available very soon:

Getting GNOME

We are also providing our own installer images for debugging and testing features. These images are meant for installation in a vm and require GNOME Boxes with UEFI support. We suggest getting Boxes from Flathub.

GNOME OS Nightly

If you are interested in building applications for GNOME 47, look for the GNOME 47 Flatpak SDK, which is available in the http://www.flathub.org/ repository.

This six-month effort wouldn’t have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world: developers, designers, documentation writers, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, students, system administrators, companies, artists, testers, the local GUADEC team in Denver,
and last, but not least, our users.

GNOME would not exist without all of you. Thank you to everyone!

We hope to see some of you at GNOME Asia 2024 in Bengaluru, India!

Our next release, GNOME 48, is planned for March 2025. Until then, enjoy GNOME 47.

The GNOME release team

[See the original Discourse Post]

GNOME Foundation Opens Search for New Executive Director

The GNOME Foundation is excited to announce that we have officially opened the search for a new Executive Director. This is an exciting time for our organization as we seek a dynamic leader to guide us into the future, continuing our mission to foster the growth of GNOME and the wider free software community.

As the cornerstone of our leadership team, the Executive Director will play a critical role in shaping the strategic direction of the Foundation, working closely with staff, community members, and partners to expand our reach and impact. The ideal candidate will have professional experience working with nonprofits, a strong passion for open-source software, a deep commitment to our community values, and the vision to drive the next phase of GNOME’s growth and development.

The position offers a unique opportunity to lead a pivotal project in the open-source ecosystem, collaborating with a global network of contributors and partners. Interested candidates can find more details on the role and how to apply on our careers page.

We encourage qualified individuals who share our vision of promoting software freedom and innovation to apply. We are looking forward to finding the next Executive Director who will carry forward the mission of the GNOME Foundation, driving positive change within the tech world and beyond.

Applications are due by October 15^th, 2024.

Learn More and Apply

GNOME Foundation Announces Transition of Executive Director

Today, the GNOME Foundation announces that Holly Million will be departing from her role as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. An Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, has joined the Foundation this week. This arrangement ensures a smooth transition and continuity as we prepare for a new Executive Director search. Holly’s last day will be July 31, and she and Richard will be able to coordinate their efforts during this period.

“I’m very proud of what I have accomplished in my time with GNOME,” Holly said, “and I am dedicated to working with Richard through a transition to ensure that everything I have been working on is handed off smoothly. I will be pursuing a PhD in Psychology and dedicating myself to my own private practice. I want to thank all the wonderful people I have had the pleasure of connecting with here at GNOME, including the staff, board, advisors, founders, and volunteers. You have created something of real value in the world, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.”

On behalf of the whole GNOME community, the Board of Directors would like to give our utmost thanks to Holly for her achievements during the past 10 months, including drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves.

The Foundation’s Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, brings years of open source leadership as part of his work as an organizer of SustainOSS and CURIOSS, as a sustainability coordinator at the Open Source Initiative, and as a community development manager at Open Source Collective, and through open source contributions to many projects, such as Node.js and IPFS. The Board appointed Richard in June and is confident in his ability to guide the Foundation during this transitional period.

The Board will be meeting next week to set up a search plan for a permanent Executive Director, which will be announced after GUADEC. The Foundation looks forward to talking with GNOME members and the community and answering any questions next week at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) GUADEC in Denver, as well as asynchronously with those in Berlin and around the globe.

Introducing the GNOME Foundation’s Five-Year Strategic Plan Draft

We are thrilled to share the GNOME Foundation’s Draft Five-Year Strategic Plan proposal, a roadmap that sets the stage for our collective journey towards a brighter, more sustainable future. This comprehensive plan encompasses our goals, priorities, and strategies aimed at propelling the GNOME ecosystem forward in an exciting new direction. This draft was created over a six-month period through a process that involved research, individual interviews, and group discussions with staff, board, and members. This draft has been reviewed by the Board and is now ready to share with the greater community.

We invite all members of our community to review this strategic plan, which outlines our vision for the next five years. Your insights, perspectives, and expertise are crucial as we move forward together. Your feedback will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of GNOME, ensuring that our work continues to empower our users worldwide and drive open-source innovation.

Please take the time to review the strategic plan and share your thoughts with us. Whether you’re a developer, designer, user, or advocate, your voice matters. Your input will be collected ahead of GUADEC, where we will provide additional opportunities to ask questions, give feedback, and offer ideas. Together we can create a stronger open source ecosystem that meets the diverse needs of our global community.

Read the Strategic Plan

Black Python Devs Join the GNOME Foundation Nonprofit Umbrella

The GNOME Foundation and Black Python Devs are proud to announce that our organizations have entered into a fiscal sponsorship agreement for the mutual benefit of our communities and the greater open source world. We are thrilled to share that the GNOME Foundation will now serve as the nonprofit umbrella for Black Python Devs (BDP). The GNOME Foundation will hold BPD’s assets, accept and process donations, and perform administrative functions on behalf of BPDs, in exchange for a fee that supports the GNOME Foundation.

The GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, envisions a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. Since its inception as a project in August 1997 and its establishment as a foundation in August 2000, GNOME has been dedicated to creating a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. Our open source software guarantees certain freedoms for end users, ensuring they have control over their computing environments. With two annual releases, the GNOME desktop is the default environment for many major Linux distributions.

Black Python Devs(BPDs) is a global community hoping to increase the participation of Black and Colo(u)red Pythonistas in the greater Python Developer Community. Our goal is to become the largest community of Black Python Developers in the world and establish our community as a source for diverse leaders in local, regional, and global Python communities. The organization works to establish guidance, mentorship, and career support for Black Pythonistas around the world, and it also creates opportunities for the Python community to invest in local communities of Black Python Devs members. The organization aims to increase the participation of Black Python Devs members in existing Python community programs, events, and initiatives, and it also continues the development and growth of Black Python Devs members by establishing open-source programs.  

This new partnership will support Black Python Devs in their fundraising efforts, membership growth, and program development while also providing fiscal support to the GNOME Foundation. By joining forces, we aim to foster a more inclusive tech community and empower more individuals through open source software.

“I saw a post on the FOSS Foundation email list sharing that Black Python Devs was seeking a fiscal sponsor for their important work. I immediately reached out to Jay Miller to offer the GNOME Foundation as a place where BPDs could find a welcoming home. I was impressed with Jay’s leadership and his vision for BPDs. One of my key goals for the GNOME Foundation is to create more channels to nurture and include diverse groups in the GNOME community and in the OS world, in general, to create a more inclusive, more representative, more empowered community for our shared work. I am very enthusiastic about this fiscal sponsorship and look forward to seeing BPDs continue to grow and have a positive impact,” said Holly Million, executive director of the GNOME Foundation.

“We were pleasantly shocked when the GNOME foundation reached out to us!” said Jay Miller, Founder of Black Python Devs. “Our community leaders were excited and strongly supported our partnership plans. It’s Important that we push beyond our comfort in order to regularly make an impact. The guidance we’ve received in this process already has better prepared Black Python Devs for the journey ahead.”

This partnership allows Black Python Devs to accept donations as a US nonprofit. Those who want to help financially support the BPDs can now do so at https://blackpythondevs.com. For more information about Black Python Devs, contact leadership@blackpythondevs.com.

GNOME Foundation Welcomes Holly Million as Executive Director

We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone for the GNOME Foundation as we welcome Holly Million to our team as the new Executive Director. Holly is a multi-talented individual with a diverse background in nonprofit leadership, filmmaking, teaching, public speaking, and writing. Her commitment to empowering individuals to make a positive impact aligns perfectly with the values and goals of the GNOME Foundation.

“Holly’s unique blend of passion for empowering individuals and organizations and depth of experience fundraising at a diverse set of non-profits is precisely what the GNOME Foundation is looking for as we enter this new chapter.”
Jonathan Blandford
GNOME Foundation Hiring Committee

Holly brings three decades of invaluable experience in nonprofit management, having served as a consultant, director of development, executive director, and board member for numerous organizations. Notably, she founded the nonprofit organization Artists United, dedicated to empowering individual artists and fostering collaboration across artistic disciplines for the collective good. Additionally, Holly served as the Executive Director of the BioBricks Foundation, an international, open-source biotechnology nonprofit.

Holly holds a Master of Arts in Education from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Harvard University. Her academic background, combined with her extensive professional journey, equips her with a unique perspective that will undoubtedly contribute to the growth and success of the GNOME Foundation.

“I am impressed by the international reach of the GNOME community and the diversity of the individuals involved in creating all of this amazing output. Together, you have created something so powerful that can be further harnessed to create even more social benefit.”
Holly Million
GNOME Foundation Executive Director

We are confident that Holly’s visionary leadership and wealth of experience will guide the GNOME Foundation to new heights. Her passion for fostering self-sufficiency and empowering individuals to create positive change aligns seamlessly with our mission to create a free and open source desktop environment for all.

“We are delighted to welcome Holly to the GNOME Foundation. With her experience managing nonprofits, and passion for working with diverse communities of creators and technologists, she can strengthen the Foundation’s unique position as a partner and collaborator at the heart of the GNOME community. And, as an experienced communicator and fundraiser, she can tell our story to the outside world and position the Foundation in the wider ecosystem of nonprofits to raise the profile and impact of our incredible work.”
Robert McQueen
GNOME Foundation Board President

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Holly Million as she takes on the role of Executive Director. We look forward to working together under her guidance to continue advancing the GNOME Foundation’s mission and creating a vibrant, accessible computing experience for users worldwide.

Exciting times lie ahead for the GNOME community, and we are grateful to have Holly Million leading the way.

Introducing GNOME 45

The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 45, “Rīga”.

This release brings a new Activities indicator, a Camera usage indicator new quick settings, a Light system style, a new image viewer and a new camera app, numerous app refreshes and enhancements, and many others.

To learn more about the changes in GNOME 45, you can read the release notes.

You can also watch our release video.

GNOME 45 will be available shortly in many distributions, such as Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora 39. If you want to try it today, you can look for their beta releases, some of which are already available:

Getting GNOME

GNOME Installer

If you are interested in building applications for GNOME 45, look for the GNOME 45 Flatpak SDK, which is available in the www.flathub.org repository.

This six-month effort would not be possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world: developers, designers, documentation writers, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, students, system administrators, companies, artists, testers, the awesome local GUADEC team in Rīga, our tireless infrastructure team (thanks Andrea+Barthalion!), and last, but not least, our users.

GNOME would not exist without all of you. Thank you to everyone!

We hope to see some of you at GNOME Asia 2023 in Kathmandu, Nepal!

Our next release, GNOME 46, is planned for March 2024. Until then, enjoy GNOME 45.

The GNOME release team

Support GNOME

To get involved, please visit gnome.org/get-involved/, and to help support GNOME in producing a free and easy-to-use desktop, visit gnome.org/donate/.

Introducing GNOME 44

The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 44, ‘Kuala Lumpur’.

This release brings a grid view in the file chooser, improved settings panels for Device Security, Accessibility, etc, and refined quick settings in the shell. The Software and Files apps have seen improvements, and a whole slew of new apps has joined
the GNOME Circle.

To learn more about the changes in GNOME 44, you can read the release notes. GNOME release notes.

You can also watch our release video. GNOME release video 3

GNOME 44 will be available shortly in many distributions, such as Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 23.04. If you want to try it today, you can look for their beta releases, which will be available very soon: Getting GNOME

Try the latest and greatest GNOME software in a VM or on real hardware If you are interested in building applications for GNOME 44, look for the GNOME 44 Flatpak SDK, which is available in the Flathub repository.

This six-month effort wouldn’t have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world: developers, designers, documentation writers, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, students, system administrators, companies, artists, testers, the local GNOME Asia team in Malaysia, and last, but not least, our users.

GNOME would not exist without all of you. Thank you to everyone!

We hope to see some of you at GUADEC 2023 in Riga, Latvia!

Our next release, GNOME 45, is planned for September 2023. Until then, enjoy GNOME 44.

The GNOME release team

Support GNOME

To get involved, please visit gnome.org/get-involved/, and to help support GNOME in producing a free and easy-to-use desktop, visit gnome.org/donate/.

Further Investments in Desktop Linux

The GNOME Foundation was supported during 2020-2021 by a grant from Endless Network which funded the Community Engagement Challenge, strategy consultancy with the board, and a contribution towards our general running costs. At the end of last year we had a portion of this grant remaining, and after the success of our work in previous years directly funding developer and infrastructure work on GTK and Flathub, we wanted to see whether we could use these funds to invest in GNOME and the wider Linux desktop platform.

We’re very pleased to announce that we got approval to launch three parallel contractor engagements, which started over the past few weeks. These projects aim to improve our developer experience, make more applications available on the GNOME platform, and move towards equitable and sustainable revenue models for developers within our ecosystem. Thanks again to Endless Network for their support on these initiatives.

Flathub – Verified apps, donations and subscriptions (Codethink and James Westman)

This project is described in detail on the Flathub Discourse but goal is to add a process to verify first-party apps on Flathub (ie uploaded by a developer or an authorised representative) and then make it possible for those developers to collect donations or subscriptions from users of their applications. We also plan to publish a separate repository that contains only these verified first-party uploads (without any of the community contributed applications), as well as providing a repository with only free and open source applications, allowing users to choose what they are comfortable installing and running on their system.

Creating the user and developer login system to manage your apps will also set us up well for future enhancements, such managing tokens for direct binary uploads (eg from a CI/CD system hosted elsewhere, as is already done with Mozilla Firefox and OBS) and making it easier to publish apps from systems such as Electron which can be hard to use within a flatpak-builder sandbox. For updates on this project you can follow the Discourse thread, check out the work board on GitHub or join us on Matrix.

PWAs – Integrating Progressive Web Apps in GNOME (Phaedrus Leeds)

While everyone agrees that native applications can provide the best experience on the GNOME desktop, the web platform, and particularly PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) which are designed to be downloadable as apps and offer offline functionality, makes it possible for us to offer equivalent experiences to other platforms for app publishers who have not specifically targeted GNOME. This allows us to attract and retain users by giving them the choice of using applications from a wider range of publishers than are currently directly targeting the Linux desktop.

The first phase of the GNOME PWA project involves adding back support to Software for web apps backed by GNOME Web, and making this possible when Web is packaged as a Flatpak. So far some preparatory pull requests have been merged in Web and libportal to enable this work, and development is ongoing to get the feature branches ready for review.

Discussions are also in progress with the Design team on how best to display the web apps in Software and on the user interface for web apps installed from a browser. There has also been discussion among various stakeholders about what web apps should be included as available with Software, and how they can provide supplemental value to users without taking priority over apps native to GNOME.

Finally, technical discussion is ongoing in the portal issue tracker to ensure that the implementation of a new dynamic launcher portal meets all security and robustness requirements, and is potentially useful not just to GNOME Web but Chromium and any other app that may want to install desktop launchers. Adding support for the launcher portal in upstream Chromium, to facilitate Chromium-based browsers packaged as a Flatpak, and adding support for Chromium-based web apps in Software are stretch goals for the project should time permit.

GTK4 / Adwaita – To support the adoption of Gtk4 by the community (Emmanuele Bassi)

With the release of GTK4 and renewed interest in GTK as a toolkit, we want to continue improving the developer experience and ease of use of GTK and ensure we have a complete and competitive offering for developers considering using our platform. This involves identifying missing functionality or UI elements that applications need to move to GTK4, as well as informing the community about the new widgets and functionality available.

We have been working on documentation and bug fixes for GTK in preparation for the GNOME 42 release and have also started looking at the missing widgets and API in Libadwaita, in preparation for the next release. The next steps are to work with the Design team and the Libadwaita maintainers and identify and implement missing widgets that did not make the cut for the 1.0 release.

In the meantime, we have also worked on writing a beginners tutorial for the GNOME developers documentation, including GTK and Libadwaita widgets so that newcomers to the platform can easily move between the Interface Guidelines and the API references of various libraries. To increase the outreach of the effort, Emmanuele has been streaming it on Twitch, and published the VOD on YouTube as well.