Posted on by Michael Catanzaro

GNOME 3.26 Core Applications

Last year, I presented the GNOME 3.22 core applications: a recommendation for which GNOME applications have sufficiently-high general appeal that they should be installed out-of-the-box by operating systems that wish to ship the GNOME desktop the way that upstream intends. We received some complaints that various applications were missing from the list, but I was pretty satisfied with the end result. After all, not every high-quality application is going to have wide general appeal, and not every application with general appeal is going to meet our stringent design standards. It was entirely intentional there was not any email client (none met our standards) or chat application (IRC does not have general appeal) included, nor any developer tools (most people aren’t software developers). Our classification was, necessarily, highly-opinionated.

For GNOME 3.24, the list of core applications did not change.

For GNOME 3.26, I’m pleased to announce the addition of three new applications: GNOME Music, GNOME To Do, and Simple Scan. Distributions that choose to follow our recommendation should add these applications to their default install.

Music and To Do have spent the past year maturing. No software is perfect, but these applications are now good enough that it’s time for them to reach a wider audience and hopefully attract some new contributors. In particular, Music has had another major performance improvement that should make it more pleasant to use.

In contrast, Simple Scan has been a mature app for a long time, and has long followed GNOME design guidelines. I’m very happy to announce that development of Simple Scan has moved to GNOME infrastructure. I hope that GNOME will be a good home for Simple Scan for a long time to come.

The full list of core applications for GNOME 3.26 is as follows:

  • Archive Manager (File Roller)
  • Boxes
  • Calculator
  • Calendar (gnome-calendar, not california)
  • Characters (gnome-characters, not gucharmap)
  • Cheese
  • Clocks
  • Contacts
  • Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab)
  • Disks (gnome-disk-utility)
  • Document Viewer (Evince)
  • Documents
  • Files (Nautilus)
  • Fonts  (gnome-font-viewer)
  • Help (Yelp)
  • Image Viewer (Eye of GNOME)
  • Logs (gnome-logs, not gnome-system-log)
  • Maps
  • Music
  • Photos
  • Screenshot
  • Software
  • Simple Scan
  • System Monitor
  • Terminal
  • Text Editor (gedit)
  • To Do
  • Videos (Totem)
  • Weather
  • Web (Epiphany)

We are now up to 30 core apps! We are not likely to go much higher than this for a while. What changes are likely in the future? My hope is that within the next year we can add Credentials, a replacement for Seahorse (which is not listed above due to quality issues), remove Disk Usage Analyzer and System Monitor in favor of a new Usage app, and hopefully remove Archive Manager in favor of better support for archives in Files. But it’s too early for any of that now. We’ll have to wait and see how things develop!

14 Replies to “GNOME 3.26 Core Applications”

  2. It would be great if you could normalise these names. Nothing is worse than trying to launch the Disk Usage Analyzer from the command line, only to find no such command, then having to Google for the actual command name.

    1. Don’t launch it from the command line then. If you’re launching things from the command line, it’s kind of assumed you can look up the binary’s name.

    1. Who is this “you”? :-)

      GNOME developers are not interchangeable; if you want an Evolution re-design to happen you will need to either convince the existing Evolution contributors to stop doing what they are doing, and implement the new UI design; or you will need to contribute it yourself.

  4. Man, you like rofling or something? This cant be serious. Gedit cant be core app, it’s unmaintained about a year and has some ugly ui bugs (like ignoring gnome text scaling factor). I guess you should check how apps works before making this list.

    1. It’s very unfortunate that gedit is not actively-maintained anymore, but it is nevertheless one of the most stable complex applications we have. I’ve used it daily for programming (I want to switch to Builder, but am stuck in old habits) for the past five years, and it still works great. I’m not aware of any major UI bugs (although I don’t use the scaling factor setting).

      Do you want us to release a desktop without a text editor? What would you include instead?

      1. “Do you want us to release a desktop without a text editor? What would you include instead?”

        That sums up GNOME in a nutshell…

        “Just release whatever trash we have and close all the bug reports at the end of every cycle and pretend they don’t exist.”

        GNOME is a failed and dying project.

  5. Actually, Im using gedit regulary too, I’m used to it. Even it has some bugs/annoying stuff.
    >Do you want us to release a desktop without a text editor? What would you include instead?
    I dont know. I’m just an angry user. I mean, i appreciate all the work gnome team do, to make simple & comfort DE, but sometimes it feels like they missing something.

    How can core application be abadonware? Rithorical question.

    1. > I mean, i appreciate all the work gnome team do, to make simple & comfort DE, but sometimes it feels like they missing something.

      Volunteers. GNOME is missing volunteers writing code and fixing bugs.

  6. agreed with next year plans, plus:
    – Evince and Eog _fully_ replaced by Documents and Photos
    – Books merged with Documents
    – streamlined Cheese and Weather
    – need a backup utility (rsync based?)

  7. In an ideal world a new gnome editor would just be a gnome-builder fork that strips away all the features not needed for plain text editing.

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