The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.
This investment will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:
Improve the current state of accessibility
Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
Encrypt user home directories individually
Modernize secrets storage
Increase the range and quality of hardware support
Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience
I really do wish governments invested more in open source. If it's a generic thing like an operating system that the public could benefit from at large, they would be doing the public a service.
This is fantastic! Gnome is such a great project! Well done!
This will sound silly, but I didn't realize that governments support open source like this. But it's such a good idea! It's similar to governments funding a park or a road any other public resource. Open source projects fit very nicely there!
Awesome stuff! This is something that major already know, but governments are learning. You can actually invest in FOSS, and unlike renting software you can make improvements that will better fit what you need it to do and not have to pay more for privilidge in the future.
And for everyone saying KDE as opposed to Gnome, they work together you dinguses! It's a friendly competition at times, but being FOSS they can and do easily learn and grow from each other.
normal application tray and buttons for close, maximise and minimize
dolphin ! (But any capable filemanager with spacesaving UI, extensions, an editable location bar, drag/drop dialogs, selection mode, preview, pinned favourites, kfind integration,... would do)
are all simply better than the GNOME counterpart. Also things like the clickboxes of decorations actually reaching to the top corner is something so obvious its crazy that GNOME simply ignores that and you need to directly point to the "x".
Great work by Sonny and Tobias. Really happy to hear that more effort will be invested into accessibility, as I feel it's really been lagging over the past couple of years.
I hope they also look at Linux Mint and the Cinnamon desktop. It's massively popular and that team work very hard. I'm sure they could use that support to help them focus on improving Cinnamon, the toolkit, accessibility etc.
Happy for Gnome though, they are a long standing project and used by many distro's. I have used Gnome in the past and it's decent, although a little heavy on RAM.
Would be great to see Debian also get this, being one of the oldest Linux distro's and the basis for Ubuntu, which in turn has spawned many distros.
GNOME is well deserving as the most polished and optimally performant DE. GNOME is so good, Windows 11 copied its workflow, layouts and even the taskbar right-click menu with 23H2.
I wonder if the "Encrypt user home directories individually" will actually make use of systemd-homed since that has support for encrypted home dir and eviction of keys related to that during suspending.