Recently there have been a number of reports (bug 2183743, bug 2276698, bug 2283839, bug 2312355) about the plymouth boot splash not showing properly on PCs using AMD GPUs.

The problem without plymouth and AMD GPUs is that the amdgpu driver is a really really big driver, which easily takes up to 10 seconds to load on older PCs. The delay caused by this may cause plymouth to timeout while waiting for the GPU to be initialized, causing it to fallback to the 3 dot text-mode boot splash.

There are 2 workaround for this depending on the PCs configuration:

1. With older AMD GPUs the radeon driver is actually used to drive the GPU but even though it is unused the amdgpu driver still loads slowing things down.

To check if this is the case for your PC start a terminal in a graphical login session and run: "lsmod | grep -E '^radeon|^amdgpu'" this will output something like this:

amdgpu 17829888 0
radeon 2371584 37

The second number after each is the usage count. As you can see in this example the amdgpu driver is not used. In this case you can disable the loading of the amdgpu driver by adding "modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu" to your kernel commandline:

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu"


2. If the amdgpu driver is actually used on your PC then plymouth not showing can be worked around by telling plymouth to use the simpledrm drm/kms device created from the EFI framebuffer early on boot, rather then waiting for the real GPU driver to load. Note this depends on your PC booting in EFI mode. To do this run:

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="plymouth.use-simpledrm"


After using 1 of these workarounds plymouth should show normally again on boot (and booting should be a bit faster).

comments

14 Sep 2024 1:38pm GMT

I am pleased to introduce the first stable release of Casilda!

A simple Wayland compositor widget for Gtk 4 which can be used to embed other processes windows in your Gtk 4 application.

It was originally created for Cambalache's workspace using wlroots, a modular library to create Wayland compositors.

Following Wayland tradition, this library is named after my hometown in Santa Fe, Argentina

License

Casilda is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 only.

Where to get it?

Source code lives on GNOME gitlab here

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/jpu/casilda.git

Manual installation

This is a regular meson package and can be installed the usual way.

# Configure project in _build directory
meson setup --wipe --prefix=~/.local _build .

# Build and install in ~/.local
ninja -C _build install

How to use it

To add a Wayland compositor to your application all you have to do is create a CasildaCompositor widget. You can specify which UNIX socket the compositor will listen for clients connections or let it will choose one automatically.

compositor = casilda_compositor_new ("/tmp/casilda-example.sock");
gtk_window_set_child (GTK_WINDOW (window), GTK_WIDGET (compositor));

Once the compositor is running you can connect to it by specifying the socket in WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable.

export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
export WAYLAND_DISPLAY=/tmp/casilda-example.sock
gtk4-demo

API

The api is pretty simple CasildaCompositor has two properties, socket and bg-color.

• socket: The unix socket file to connect to this compositor (string)
• bg-color: Compositor background color (GdkRGBA)

Matrix channel

Have any question? come chat with us at #cambalache:gnome.org

Mastodon

Follow me in Mastodon @xjuan to get news related to Casilda and Cambalache development.

Happy coding!

13 Sep 2024 5:36pm GMT

Well, it's time for another release.

Last cycle wasn't particularly exciting, only featuring the new dialogs and a few smaller changes, but this one should be more interesting. So let's look at what's new.

Bottom sheet

Last cycle libadwaita got new dialogs, which can be presented as bottom sheets on mobile, and I mentioned that they will also be available as a standalone widget in future - so AdwBottomSheet exists and is public now.

As a standalone widget, bottom sheets work a bit differently from dialogs - they are persistent instead of being destroyed upon closing, more like the sidebar of AdwOverlaySplitView.

They also have a few new features, such as a drag handle, or a bottom bar presentation. This is useful for apps like music players.

AdwHeaderBar also integrates with bottom sheets - it hides the title when used in a bottom sheet with a drag handle.

Spinner

Libadwaita also has a new spinner widget - AdwSpinner. It both refreshes visuals and addresses various problems with GtkSpinner.

GtkSpinner is a really simple widget. Both the spinner itself and the animation are set in CSS. The spinner is just a symbolic icon, and the animation is a CSS animation. This approach has a few problems, however.

First, the old spinner has a gradient. Symbolic icons don't actually support gradients, so it has to resort to dithering, as Jakub Steiner explained in his blog a few years ago. This works well if the spinner is small enough (16×16 - 32×32), but becomes very noticeable at larger sizes. This means that the spinner didn't work well for loading screens, or status pages.

Meanwhile, CSS animations are entirely disabled when system animations are off. Usually that makes sense, except here it means the spinner freezes, defeating the entire point of having it (indicating that the app isn't frozen during long operations).

And, while CSS animations are pretty sophisticated, you can only do so much with a single element - so it's literally a spinning icon. elementary OS does a more interesting thing - it spins it in steps, while the icon consists of 12 dashes, so it looks like they change color instead. Even then, more complex animations are impossible.

AdwSpinner avoids all of these issues. Since it's in libadwaita and not in GTK, it can be more opinionated with regard to styling, so instead of using an icon and CSS, it's just custom drawing. And since it's not using CSS animations, it can keep spinning with animations off, and can animate in a more involved way than a simple spinning icon.

It still has a size limit - 64×64 pixels. While it can scale further, we don't really need larger sizes and capping the size makes it easier to use - to make a loading screen using GtkSpinner, you have to set the :halign and :valign properties to CENTER, as well as :width-request and :height-request properties to 32. If you fail to do these steps, the spinner will either be too large, or too small respectively:

Meanwhile if you just put an AdwSpinner into a large bin, it will look right by default.

Oh, and GtkSpinner is invisible by default and you have to set the :spinning property to true as well. This made sense back in the age of foot and dinosaur spinners, where the spinner would stay in place when not animating, but that's not really a thing anymore.

(though Nautilus wasn't actually using GtkSpinner)

It also didn't help that until this cycle, GtkSpinner would continue to consume CPU cycles even when not visible if the :spinning property is left enabled, so you had to start the spinner in the ::map signal and stop it in ::unmap. That is fixed now, but it was a major source of lag in, say, Epiphany in the past (which had a spinner in every tab, another spinner in every mobile tab switcher row and another one in the floating bar that shows URLs on hover, copied from Nautilus).

Spinner paintable

In addition to AdwSpinner, there's also AdwSpinnerPaintable. It can be used with GtkImage, any other place that accepts paintables (such as status pages) or just manually drawn. It is a bit more awkward to use than the widget, as it needs to reference another widget so it can animate (since paintables cannot access the frame clock), but it allows to use spinners in contexts that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

AdwStatusPage even has a special style for spinner paintable - similar to the .compact style, but applied automatically.

Button row

Another widget we have now is AdwButtonRow - a list row that looks more or less like a button. It has a label, optionally icons on either side, and can use destructive and suggested style classes.

This pattern isn't new - it has been used in mockups for a while (at least as early as 2021) - but it varied quite a bit between different mockups and implementation and so having a standard widget for it wasn't viable. This cycle Jamie Gravendeel and kramo took time to standardize the existing designs into a tangible proposal - so it exists as a standard widget now.

Most of the time these rows aren't meant to be linked together, so AdwPreferencesGroup has a new property :separate-rows. When enabled, the rows within will appear separately. This is mostly useful for button rows, but also e.g. entry rows. When not using AdwPreferencesGroup, the same effect can be achieved by using the .boxed-list-separate style class instead of .boxed-list.

Multi-layout view

Libadwaita 1.4 introduced AdwBreakpoint, which allowed to easily set properties on window size changes. However, a lot of apps need layout changes that can't be expressed via simple properties - say, switching between a sidebar and a bottom sheet. While it is possible to do it programmatically anyway, it's fairly involved and not a lot of apps went to those lengths.

Back then I also prototyped a widget for automatically reparenting children between different layouts via using a property mentioned a future widget for automatically reparenting children between different layouts, and now it's finished and available for use as AdwMultiLayoutView.

It has changed somewhat since the prototype, e.g. it doesn't dynamically create or destroy layouts anymore, just parents/unparents them, but the gist is still the same:

• Put multiple AdwLayouts into a multi-layout view
• Put one or more AdwLayoutSlot into each layout, give them IDs
• Define children matching those IDs

Then those children will be placed into the slots for the current layout. When you switch the layout, they will be reparented into slots from that layout instead.

So now it's possible to define completely different layouts for desktop and mobile entirely via UI files.

CSS variables and colors

I've already talked about this in a lot of detail in my last blog post, but GTK has a lot of new CSS goodies, and libadwaita 1.6 makes full use of them.

To recap: GTK now supports CSS variables, as well as color-mix(), relative colors, as well as new color spaces, most importantly Oklab and Oklch.

Libadwaita now provides CSS variables for all of its old named colors, with a docs page to go with it, as well as new variables: --dim-opacity, --disabled-opacity, --border-opacity and --window-radius.

This also allowed to have matching focus ring color on .destructive-action buttons, as well as matching accent color for the .error, .warning and .success style classes. And because overriding accent color for a specific widget is now possible, .opaque button style class has been deprecated in favor of overriding accent colors on .suggested-action. Meanwhile, the white accent color of .osd is now more reliable and automatically works for custom widgets, instead of trying (and often failing) to manually override it for every standard widget.

I mentioned that it might be possible to generate standalone accent/error/etc colors from their respective background colors. However, the question was how to make that automatic, so at the time we didn't actually integrate that. Now it is integrated, though it's not completely automatic - only for :root.

Specifically, there's a new variable: --standalone-color-oklab, corresponding to the correct color transformation for the current style.

So, when overriding accent color for a specific widget, there is a bit of boilerplate to copy:

my-widget {
  --accent-bg-color: var(--accent-purple);
  --accent-color: oklab(from var(--accent-bg-color) var(--standalone-color-oklab));
}

It's still an improvement over calculating the color manually, both for light and dark styles (which a lot of apps didn't do at all, resulting in poor contrast), so still worth it. Maybe one day we'll be able to make it completely automatic - e.g. by ensuring that using variables with wildcards doesn't regress performance.

Meanwhile adw_rgba_to_standalone() allows to do the same thing programmatically.

Accent colors

Another big feature is system accent color support. While it's not a strictly libadwaita change, this is the developer-facing part, so it makes sense to talk about it here.

Behind the scenes it's using the settings portal which provides a standardized key for the system accent color. Many other environments support it as well, so libadwaita apps will follow their accent color preferences too, while non-GNOME apps that follow the preference will follow it on GNOME too. Note that while the portal exposes arbitrary sRGB colors, libadwaita will pick the closest color from a list of nine colors, as visible on the screenshot above. This is done in the Oklch color space, mostly based on hue, so should work even for really dull colors.

Accent colors are also supported when running on Windows and macOS, and like with the color scheme and high contrast, the libadwaita page in GTK inspector allows to toggle the system accent color now.

Apps are still free to set their own accent color. CSS always takes priority over the system accent.

A lot of people helped push this over the finish line, with particular thanks to Jamie Murphy, kramo and Jamie Gravendeel.

API

AdwStyleManager provides new properties for fetching the system color - :accent-color and :accent-color-rgb, as well as :system-supports-accent-colors for querying whether the system has accent color preferences - same as for color scheme.

The :accent-color property returns a color from the AdwAccentColor enum, so that individual colors can be special cased (say, when using bitmap assets). This color can be converted both to background color RGBA (using adw_accent_color_to_rgba()) and to standalone color (adw_accent_color_to_standalone_rgba()).

All of these colors use white foreground color, so there's no API for fetching it, at least for now.

Note that :accent-color-rgba will still return the system color even if the app overrides its accent color using CSS. It only exists for convenience and is equivalent to calling adw_accent_color_to_rgba() on the :accent-color value.

While we still don't have a general replacement for deprecated gtk_style_context_lookup_color(), the new accent color API can replace at least some of its uses.

On CSS side, there are new variables corresponding to each accent color: --accent-blue for blue and so on. Additionally, every system color, along with their standalone colors for both light and dark, is documented and can be used as a reference.

Destructive buttons

Having accent color that's not always blue means having to rethink other style choices. In particular, .destructive-action buttons were just a red version of .suggested-action, same as in GTK3. This was already questionable from accessibility perspective, but breaks entirely with accent colors, since suggested buttons would look exactly same as a destructive ones with red accent. And so .destructive-action has a distinct style now, less prominent than suggested.

Alert dialogs

Another area that needed updates was AdwAlertDialog - it was also using color for differentiating suggested and destructive buttons.

Coincidentally, the alert dialog style went almost unchanged from GTK3 days, and looked rather out of place with the rest of the platform. So kramo came up with an updated design.

AdwMessageDialog and GtkAlertDialog received the same style, or at least an approximation - it's not possible to replicate it entirely in GTK dialogs. Even though neither is recommended for use (when using libadwaita, anyway - nothing wrong with using GtkAlertDialog in plain GTK), regressing apps that aren't fully up to date with the platform wouldn't be very good.

Adapting apps

Accent colors are supported automatically, and in most cases apps don't need any changes to make use of them. However, here's a checklist to ensure it works well:

• Make use of the accent color variables in custom CSS, like --accent-bg-color. Using the old named colors like @accent_bg_color works as well. Don't assume accent color will be blue.
• Conversely, don't use accent color when you mean blue. We have variables like --blue-3 for that - or even --accent-blue.
• When using accent color in custom drawing (say, drawing a graph), make sure to redraw it when AdwStyleManager:accent-color value changes - same as for color scheme and high contrast.

• Deprecations

  Last cycle we introduced new dialog widgets that are based on AdwDialog rather than GtkWindow. However, that happened right at the end of the cycle, without giving apps a lot of time to port their existing dialogs. Because of that, the old widgets (AdwMessageDialog, AdwPreferencesWindow, AdwAboutWindow) weren't deprecated and I mentioned that they will be deprecated in future instead. So, they are now.

  If you haven't migrated to the new dialogs yet, see the migration guide for how to do so.

  Other changes

  As always, there are smaller changes that don't warrant their own sections, so let's look at those:

  • AdwWindow and AdwApplicationWindow now have a default minimum size (360×200 px), meaning you don't have to set it manually to use breakpoints or dialogs anymore. Apps can still override it if they need a different size, but it works out of the box now.
  • AdwComboRow now has the :header-factory and :search-match-mode properties, following GtkDropDown. So it's now possible to, say, have separators in the dropdown list.
  • AdwEntryRow got the :max-length property, matching GtkEntry.
  • AdwPreferencesPage description now can be centered, using the :description-centered property.
  • Documentation now lists available style classes for each widget, in addition to the centralized list of style classes.
  • Markus Göllnitz made the .navigation-sidebar style class support GtkFlowBox and GtkGridView, as seen in Papers.
  • Property rows now support the .monospace style class.
  • GtkTextView now supports the .inline style class, removing its background and resetting its foreground color. This allows to use it in contexts like cards.

  Future

  As usual, there are changes that didn't make it this cycle and will land the next cycle instead. Most notably, the old toggle groups branch by Maximiliano is finally finished and will land early next cycle.

  

  ---

  Big thanks to STF for funding a lot of this work (GTK CSS improvements, bottom sheets, finishing multi-layout view and toggle groups, general maintenance), as well as people organizing the initiative and all contributors who made this release happen.

13 Sep 2024 3:32pm GMT

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 September 20^th, 2024.

13 Sep 2024 1:00pm GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 06 to September 13.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Thib says

This post is a digest of what happened in August in the STF team (a little late). You might have seen some updates from the team members directly earlier in TWIG! They say August is a productivity blackhole, but whoa look at this massive update!

I'm very grateful to the team for its dedication, and to the Sovereign Tech Fund who enables this work. The Foundation is preparing a crowdfunding platform to allow you to support this kind of work as well! More on this next month.

Encrypt user home directories individually

On Linux systems, users are traditionally managed in a specific file called /etc/passwd. It doesn't make a difference between technical and human accounts. It also only stores very basic information about users, and can only be modified by root. It's a very rigid users database.

AccountsService is a "temporary" daemon (since 2010) bringing to manage users and store more extensive information about them: profile picture, parental control settings, preferred session to log into, languages, etc. It manages /etc/passwd and its own database.

homed is a modern replacement for AccountsService. It provides encryption for user data, and paves the way for future exciting platform security and flexibility improvements.

Adrian worked with a user through some remote debugging about systemd-homed (systemd/systemd#33541 and following comments).

Modernize platform infrastructure

libadwaita

GTK is a popular development toolkit to create graphical apps in the free desktop. libadwaita is a library based on GTK providing the building blocks for modern GNOME applications.

Alice did libadwaita releases: 1.4.7, 1.5.3, 1.6.beta, and 1.6.rc. She also worked on Dialog fixes before beta (here and here), a CI fix as well as several reviews.

She shared thoughts on a common interface for platform libraries support in GTK in this issue.

Alice also worked on toggle groups

• She added crossfade support to the view stack so we can use it in contexts where you'd want an inline switcher
• She switched inline stack switcher to view stack, renamed to inline view switcher
• And she started reworking toggle group api. That work is still ongoing
• inline view switcher now supports needs-attention/badges.
• Alice also he gave the tests (including accessibility tests) some love to make sure libadwaita is as reliable as ever and implemented a new demo.
• She reworked documentation to make her work easier to use
• Finally she spent quite a bit of time on reviews for PRs have been merged (here, here, here, and here and quite a few more) and on PRs that have not.

Toggle groups should be ready, waiting for 47 to branch now.

Shell notifications

If you have followed Julian's GUADEC talk about notifications on the free desktop, you know that the current situation is suboptimal. Fortunately, the design team and Julian are coming to the rescue, and are also working on grouped notifications to make them less in your face.

Julian split out refactor part of of the notification grouping MR, so that it can be merged sooner. He also addressed comments and got his cleanup MR merged into GNOME Shell.

Julian rewrote glsl shader for fading notifications when a group is expanded. He looked into round clipping for mutter, which would be really nice for grouping. This will require a significant amount of non trivial work to do correctly.

Finally, he worked on notification grouping for GNOME Shell: after addressing the style suggestions he marked the notification grouping MR as ready.

Improve QA and development tooling

gjs bindings

Evan finished work on getting async support for GJS, compiling again and is debugging test failures.

He is working on updating async tests for the TypeScript bindings.

Finally, GLib async support needs additional work to fix Windows CI (hopefully the last roadblock 🤞).

systemd-sysupdated

systemd-sysupdate is an update system allowing immutable systems to apply lightweight delta updates. It helps image-based systems support immutability, auto-updates, adaptability, factory reset, uniformity and providing a trust chain from the bootloader all the way up.

sysupdate is a CLI tool. In order to be able to use systemd-sysupdate, sturdier services are needed. sysupdated is a service that provides a dbus API for sysupdate.

sysupdated got a final re-review, and got merged into systemd. Adrian followed-up fixes after merging.

He rebased the incomplete versions bugfix, and got it merged, worked on optional features, major os upgrades, updatectl (a user facing CLI for sysupdate) bugfixes and more.

systemd-repart

systemd-repart is a tool that systemd runs on boot that non-destructively repartitions disks.

Adrian taught it to dynamically decide whether or not to create a separate boot partition. Depending on the existing layout of disk, repart will skip creating a dedicated boot partition if it can get away with it, which is one of the big missing features in repart before it can be an OS installer.

Improve the state and compatibility of accessibility

Joanie has been working on a metric tonne of updates in Orca. Most of the changes are rather technical and would be rather wordy in a TWIG update, but thanks Joanie for rejuvenating Orca!

Maintenance and modernization of security components

The free desktop standardises the storage and usage of secrets (such as passphrases or SSH keys) via the secrets specification. gnome-keyring was the backend implementation, and libsecret the client-side of said specification.

gnome-keyring and libsecret are written in C and lack maintenance. oo7 is a modern Rust client-side library that respects the secrets specification. Dhanuka is extending oo7 to implement the backend side of secrets management, and ultimately replace gnome-keyring, has been at it in August as well!

Secure APIs for Wayland/Flatpak

Flatpak

Georges handled Flatpak / Bubblewrap CVE-2024-42472, released xdg-dbus-proxy 0.1.6 with important fixes, coordinated more merges, and released Flatpak 1.16.0.

He also implemented a solution to the "impossible" Flatpak a11y issue (here, here and here). This accessibility issue revolved around the Flatpak sandbox preventing WebKit and Epiphany's accessibility trees from being connected.

USB Portal

Flatpak doesn't have USB permission. To access USB currently, the device=all permission must be used. This exposes all the devices on the machine.

We want to provide a way to allow selective access to USB devices from inside a sandbox like flatpak. This is access to the actual USB, not the devices build on top, like audio, input or mass storage.

Hub rebased the xdg-desktop-portal PR for the USB portal, and rebased the flatpak PR for USB. Finally, https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5855 landed.

Closing thoughts

Again, a massive massive thank you to the whole team who has been working on the STF grant, and our gratitude to the Sovereign Tech Fund who makes this possible. The team is working with all their heart to bring not only GNOME but also the free desktop as a whole forward.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) says

libadwaita 1.6.0 is out! see the blog post for details.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Pablo Correa Gomez reports

Thanks to Jan-Michael Brummer (Volkswagen), Papers now supports signing documents with digital certificates! If you have a digital certificate stored in your computer or in an Smart Card, as those stored in the national IDs of some states like Estonia or Spain, you no longer need an additional program to digitally sign your documents! See the Merge Request description for a walk-through of the UX!

Third Party Projects

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton announces

Upscaler version 1.3.0 was just released! The release is pretty large and includes some nice features and visual improvements:

• Introduce queue system to allow users to upscale images right after the other
• Add branding colors
• Port to latest Adwaita widgets
• Allow dropping remote images
• Allow pasting images from clipboard
• Make window draggable from anywhere
• Delete temporary file when unused
• Switch to Upscayl-NCNN from Real-ESRGAN ncnn Vulkan
• Update and rework translation
• Add Bulgarian translation

Unfortunately, I completely forgot that the GNOME 47 runtime isn't released yet. The update will be available later once the GNOME 47 runtime is out. If you want to try it out, you can build it from source (roughly a few minutes) using GNOME Builder: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Upscaler#gnome-builder

Krafting says

Version 1.2.0 of SemantiK is out now. It is a word-guessing game.

This new version includes the ability to download language packs. The first language pack to be available is the English language pack, which you can download on Flathub through your software center of choice.

The UI is still in French, but I'll be adding a translated UI in the next version!

You can download SemantiK from Flathub

If people want to help build more language packs, feel free to contact me!

xjuan says

Introducing Casilda - A Wayland compositor widget!

A simple Wayland compositor widget for Gtk 4 which can be used to embed other processes windows in your Gtk 4 application. It was originally created for Cambalache's workspace using wlroots, a modular library to create Wayland compositors. Following Wayland tradition, this library is named after my hometown in Santa Fe, Argentina

Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/09/13/introducing-casilda-wayland-compositor-widget/

Pipeline

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi reports

Pipeline version 2.0.0 was released. Pipeline lets you follow your favorite video creators, both on YouTube and PeerTube. Version 2.0.0 is a complete rewrite of the application, in order allow for easier maintenance, more features (some included in this version, some in future versions) and improve the user experience in general.

The highlights of this version are the ability to search YouTube and PeerTube for videos and channels and playing videos inside the application using the Clapper video player (while the option to play with any other external player is still available). Besides those highlights, the application should have feature-parity with previous releases of Pipeline. This includes in particular:

• Displaying videos of your subscriptions in a single feed,
• Filtering out unwanted videos, for example Shorts or videos from a series you don't like,
• Managing videos you want to watch later,
• Importing your previous subscriptions from NewPipe or YouTube,
• Download videos you want to watch offline.

You can get the latest release on Flathub, and feel free to chat with us in our Matrix room.

Miscellaneous

Jan-Michael Brummer says

Software development without Linux is no longer possible within an automotive environment. Therefore Volkswagen Group IT created and maintains a Linux distribution for their developers and contributes to many upstream projects. Jan-Michael Brummer speaks at OpenSUSE 2024 (https://media.ccc.de/v/4486-linux-at-volkswagen/oembed) about the starting goal to integrate into the existing environment, and highlights their integration problems and solutions with contributing to upstream: libproxy, OneDrive (gvfs/goa), PKCS11 (Secrets / Web), Digital Signing (Papers), …

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

The GNOME Foundation has announced that hiring is open for its next Executive Director. Details about the position can be found on the GNOME Foundation website, at OpenSource Job Hub, and fossjobs.net. Please share the post with your networks and reach out to any candidates you might know. In other Foundation news, the Board of Directors had its regular monthly meeting this week, where it focused on budget planning for the upcoming financial year. We are also pleased to announce that Richard Littauer, the Foundation's current interim executive director, will be continuing in his position until the end of November.

Rosanna reports

The big news this week from the Foundation is our opening up the search for a new Executive Director. Our current Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, is helping us with this search. More details about this job opening is available https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/09/13/search-for-new-executive-director/.

Earlier this week, I attended the monthly board meeting and went through a very rough, preliminary draft of a budget for the Board. Not intended to be a working budget, this draft is just a starting point to begin discussion. While it is up to the Finance Committee to hammer this draft into something usable, this exercise of going over it with the board at large was useful in showing our directors the format and structure of our yearly budget, and in explaining what the groupings and categories cover. I am looking forward with the rest of the Finance Committee on the next steps.

That's all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

13 Sep 2024 12:00am GMT

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Alien: Romulus. While many of my friends were disappointed, I actually enjoyed it. In fact, it exceeded my expectations - mainly because I didn't expect much! :)

Fede Alvarez delivered exactly what producer Ridley Scott asked of him, leaning heavily on the nostalgia of the original masterpiece while skirting the edge of a reboot. The world of Prometheus wasn't ignored, but purposedly avoided referencing too deeply.

The dystopian world of corporate feudalism set a tone even darker than the original, to the point where the xenomorph didn't seem like the worst thing that could happen. I'm still holding out hope for 90-minute movies as the gold standard, but the two-hour runtime was manageable-though my aging buttocks may disagree. The slow-burn first act was actually the most enjoyable part, as that's where the fresh world-building took center stage. Even as the familiar plot unfolded, Alvarez delivered memorable suspense and action scenes.

Of course, it's never going to feel the same as seeing Alien or Aliens as a teenager. I can't fully dive into my minor criticisms without spoilers, but let's just say the movie understood that "less is more" - except in one area. Other than that, Alien: Romulus proved that going to the movies can still be a pretty great experience.

★★★★☆

12 Sep 2024 10:00pm GMT

We are excited to announce that GNOME Asia 2024 will take place in Bengaluru, India, from December 6^th-8^th.

This year the summit will offer a hybrid experience allowing attendees to participate virtually or in person.

The Call for Participation is now open. We are accepting both in-person and remote talks and workshops. If you are interested in submitting a proposal make sure to apply on our event website by September 30^th.

If you or your company are interested in sponsoring GNOME Asia 2024, please review our sponsorship brochure and get in touch with us at asia@gnome.org.

About Bengaluru

Bengaluru, often called the "Silicon Valley of India," is a dynamic city known for its thriving tech scene and vibrant open-source community. As a key hub for technology and innovation, Bengaluru is home to many Linux and GNOME contributors who play a vital role in the global open-source movement. The city has also become a focal point for startups and IT giants, contributing significantly to technological advancements and digital solutions.

Beyond its technological achievements, Bengaluru boasts a rich cultural heritage. Visitors can explore iconic landmarks such as the Bangalore Palace, Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace, and the historic Bull Temple. The city's spiritual side shines through at the ISKCON Temple, while the grandeur of Vidhana Soudha stands as a testament to its political significance. For those seeking tranquility, serene green spaces like Lalbagh Botanical Garden, Cubbon Park, and Ulsoor Lake offer a respite from the urban buzz.

Bengaluru enjoys a pleasant climate year-round, with moderate temperatures and a mix of sunny and rainy days, adding to its appeal as a city of innovation and tradition. This unique blend of a progressive tech hub and cultural richness makes Bengaluru a standout destination both for its technological prowess and its historical charm.

Image credit: "South Bengaluru Skyline as seen from ISKCON, Banashankari" by Raghavan2010 is licensed under CC BY 4.0

About GNOME.Asia

GNOME.Asia is a featured annual conference focused on the GNOME project and the GNOME desktop environment. The summit aims at bringing the GNOME community in Asia together to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments, and businesses to discuss current technology and future developments.

About GNOME

GNOME is a free and open-source software environment project supported by a non-profit foundation. Together, the community of contributors and the Foundation create a computing platform and software ecosystem, composed entirely of free software, that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.

12 Sep 2024 8:13pm GMT

I wrote a post about so called "M type" and "S type" processes in software development. Unfortunately it discusses the concept of human sexuality. Now, just to be sure, it does not have any of the "good stuff" as the kids might say. Nonetheless this blog is syndicated in places where such topics might be considered controversial or even unacceptable.

Thus I can't really post the text here. Those of you who are of legal age (whatever that means in your jurisdiction) and out of their own free will want to read such material, can access the PDF version of the article via this link.

11 Sep 2024 9:33pm GMT

📢The Usability Study Report for Loup, Showtime, and Decibels, conducted during the May to August Outreachy internship round, is now available!

🚀 Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gRZs5VR4

09 Sep 2024 11:10am GMT

It's been a while since I've annoyed you by mentioning drones, but here we are with DJI's latest creation-the Neo. DJI is a giant, soulless corporation, but they've made some clever design decisions with this drone. It's a flying camera that works without a phone or remote, and for about half the price of a GoPro, you get a self-sufficient, button-operated flying cameraman. Take it out, push a button, and off it goes, capturing footage like it knows what it's doing. It might also just simply be a response to the actually innovative HoverAir X1, just made extremely affordable.

The camera quality won't blow you away, but it's solid enough if you can overlook its overly-sharpened aesthetic. The Neo can even play the part of a lightweight cinewhoop or a poor man's DJI Mini, though that's only if you own DJI's latest goggles and remotes-so there's a bit of a catch. I bought it mainly for the fun shots you're watching here, and while I'm not interested in keeping up with DJI's endless upgrades, I must admit the little drone has charm and utility.

Neo's Follow mode is a standout, tracking you accurately with just its camera feed and no fancy sensors. It tries to follow your path to avoid hitting anything. But beware the Direction Tracking mode in crowded areas-it has a habit of misjudging where you're facing and wobbling about. The biggest hiccup I encountered? No gesture to make it return home, which left me standing under it after performing a Rocket shot, until the battery ran out. Luckily the pain lasted only about 10 minutes. Overall, it's a great toy for hikes, casual outings, and occasional public embarrassment.

Soundtrack for the poorly edited video above comes from my 2024 weekly beats endeavors. Looks like I have enough material for a 2025 album. Stay tuned!

08 Sep 2024 10:00pm GMT

Switch to Vector-based Map

Light (default) theme variant of the map in 47

Dark theme variant of the map in 47

Redesigned Search Bar

Search bar with explore button

This also looks a bit sleeker I think…

Improved Public Transit Routing

Showing some travel itinerary options in Prague

Showing a sample of an itinerary from Lund, Sweden to Hamburg, Germany

Showing a sample of an itinerary in Denver, Colorado

Updated Highway Shield Localizations

French departmental routes (D-roads)

Turkish national D-roads

Some changes had to be made to our internal shield rendering library (we couldn't use the OSM Americana implementation directly, as we had to implement ours using Cairo rendering and so on) to support the new convenience shortcut for a "pill" shield shape, and also being able to define hard-coded route references "ref" directly in the shield definition rather than getting from the tile data.

Rochester Inner Loop in Rochester, New York, using a fixed "LOOP" reference label

Highway shields in New Zeeland

It was a bit funny I discovered this bug when "browsing around" in New Zeeland considering Northern Hemisphere-centric jokes about people "Down-under" walking upside-down 😀. But this actually also affects some highways in the US…

07 Sep 2024 1:48pm GMT

07 Sep 2024 10:00am GMT

06 Sep 2024 12:15pm GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 30 to September 06.

Philip Withnall says

Thank you to the translation teams for all the translation updates which happen in GNOME, particularly just before a release, like just now. It is really appreciated!

Third Party Projects

Emmanuele Bassi announces

A wild new stable release of Cairo appeared! It's super-effective at fixing build issues and bugs on a variety of platforms and toolchains. Thanks to Federico Mena, Cairo now generates static analysis and coverage reports as part of the CI pipeline; the coverage reports are published, so if you want to contribute to the Cairo project you can now find where your changes can be most effective.

Turtle

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp reports

Turtle 0.10 has been released.

There have been a lot of fixes and refactoring, notable changes:

Credential changes

For SSH repos ssh-agent will now be used by default. This makes it easier to use different keys with or without password protection. You can still configure a predefined ssh key in the settings.

It is now possible to use HTTPS repos with username and password. A userpass dialog will prompt for your credentials which can be stored in the gnome keyring. I was not able to test this feature myself, because I do not have access to a repository which allows HTTPS with password. But it seems to work.

File-manager plugin changes

A huge bottleneck, which caused nautilus to freeze up and worst case to crash has been fixed.

Unfortunately I found another issue with the update_file_info_full function, which I can reproduce on multiple distros. For the time being the turtle plugin uses update_file_info instead. This makes emblem calculation slower, but at least it runs stable again.

There is now a turtle emblem which will be shown for the repo main folder by default. The status emblem can be activated again in the settings. It is also possible to show both or none of them. This change further speeds up emblem calculation in folders with many (100+) repos, especially with the workaround mentioned above, and also makes submodules more visible.

Parabolic

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2024.9.0-beta1 is here!

After a long awaited couple of months, Parabolic has been rewritten in C++ and features a redesigned user interface! Users should expect a faster and more reliable downloader.

We encourage all Parabolic users to give this beta a try and iron out all issues before the stable release (targeted for next week).

Here's the full changelog:

• Parabolic has been rewritten in C++ for faster performance
• The length of the kept download history can now be changed in the app's preferences
• Cookies can now be fetched from a selected browser in Preferences instead of selecting a TXT cookies file
• Parabolic's Keyring module was rewritten. As a result, all keyrings have been reset and will need to be reconfigured
• Fixed validation issues with various sites
• Fixed an issue where a specified video password was not being used
• Redesigned user interface
• Updated yt-dlp

Shell Extensions

Cleo Menezes Jr. says

Is it hot in the Northern Hemisphere and cold in the Southern Hemisphere? Weather O'Clock has been ported to GNOME Shell 47! With this new version, it is possible to customize the display of weather information, choosing whether it appears before or after the clock.

Arca says

New updates for the Day Progress extension - circular indicators and GNOME 47!

Day Progress, the extension that lets you visualise how much time is left of your day has now been ported to support GNOME 47! There is now an (experimental) option to display the time elapsed/remaining as a circular ("pie") indicator too. I haven't run into any bugs with the new indicator style in my few days of testing but I'm still hesitant to call it stable, that's why I have labelled it as 'experimental'. You can download the extension at https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7042/day-progress/ and the repository is available at https://github.com/ArcaEge/day-progress where you can also report any issues you find.

That's all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

06 Sep 2024 12:00am GMT

gst-launch-1.0 -e \
  v4l2src ! video/x-raw ! queue ! \
  whipclientsink signaller::whip-endpoint="https://my.webrtc/whip/room1"

gst-launch-1.0 -e \
  whepclientsrc signaller:whep-endpoint="https://my.webrtc/whep/room1" ! \
  decodebin ! autovideosink

04 Sep 2024 4:35pm GMT

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.

03 Sep 2024 8:33am GMT