1y ago

GNOME Recognized as Public Interest Infrastructure

foundation.gnome.org GNOME Recognized as Public Interest Infrastructure – The GNOME Foundation

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
Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
Consolidate and improve platform components

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Huge congrats on everyone who got this working. €1M will really go a long way and GNOME absolutely deserves it!
Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
I am very excite
KDE fanboi

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.
Edit: Germany does it again!
- that would be a sound investment and we can't have that, the government must focus on actively detrimental infrastructure projects to put money in the pockets of rich people.
- The US has the US Digital Service. Alex Gaynor, who has had involvement in a wide array of OSS projects, is employed there.
- Government ran distros in public schools and government offices wouldn’t be any more invasive than windows working with the government. Better yet there actually be some sort of education on using the os and exponential growth of the Linux desktop as a whole.
  I just wish KDE would get some love too. They work their asses off to make a desktop suit as many use cases and workflows as possible while maintaining a mostly polished experience. Their not afraid to implement stuff knowing it’s just a temporary solution till other projects catchup. They are actually willing to work with other projects on implementing standards and are developing standards like HDR on wayland for professional artists and gamers and are the first to jump on major features as soon as its solid.
  Gnome is just annoying mess great for smartphone users unwilling to learn anything new and had never touched a pc or Mac in their life. What’s the appeal of using something with half its features gutted for the sake of looks just to have everyone add it back in anyway. It’s an annoying Apple like philosophy of let’s implement counter intuitive interfaces to preserve a look and never change it back because we’re always right. You’d think they’d have improved the window snap feature since 3.0
  
  Ffs I knew this submission would turn into a minority of Plasma users trying to piss on Gnome. Can you not just be happy that an open source project is receiving help and that this will be a big improvement for accessibility features?
  I never hear Gnome users crying about Valve heavily supporting KDE, so why are you angry about this?
  
  Oh I see, I didn't realize there was such a contrast between the cultures of KDE and GNOME. Idk why ppl are downvoting you

Congrats GNOME!
Does anyone know if homedir encryption will utilize systemd-homed?
- That’s the plan.
  
  My comment wasn't meant as a jab against systemd or gnome, I was just curious if there are different solutions for an encrypted homedir.
  I really like the direction linux, systemd and gnome are going! Big thank you to all the developers! <3

Sovereignty from whom though??
Turns out, the Germans.
Seems like a cool initiative
- yes, we are quite good at funding foss
- Sovereignty as in it is sponsored by or own by a nation-state. Similarly, Norway has a sovereign wealth fund derived from its oil profits.
  
  Yes! I just kinda posted it as a rethorical question. I think it's important to know where the money is really coming from :)

Great News!

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.

Will we finally get properly working system tray? Man can dream...
- They've been trying to make a cross-desktop standard for a little while now, but progress is certainly slow :/

Wow, 1M it's a lot! I wish we could have more organizations like this in more countries.

I prefer KDE currently, because
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)
spectacle
kate
systemsettings (keyboard shortcuts, theming, mouse speed, Graphic tablet, flatpak permissions, system info, ...)
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".
I like that Gnome is untraditional though.
- As the first paragraph says: "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."
  Let's hope that means improving all that.
- Gnome has the best accessibility tools for disabled people
  It’s often glossed over
- I'm also on KDE at the moment, but I appreciate the money going into FOSS desktop experience. Most importantly as keeping things viable for the future. Also KDE and GNOME both, one presumes, learn from each others successes.
- Windows XP's grip ever tightens well past its death
  
  Good design is good design.
  
  Did the windows before not have regular menu with all that? I think its an okay concept, even though I can imagine something like workspaces could make sense too.

I'm very interested in the secrets storage. Hopefully that includes integrating programs with GNOME Secrets, especially firefox
- That is a Mozilla task. I can’t imagine they want it.
  
  There are browser extensions like KeepassXC

Cool. Now how about image thumbnail in the file picker. I mean seriously...
- Wasn't this fixed finally a while ago? I swear i read somewhere it was.
  
  My understanding is it's 13 years or so of requests, and still nothing. Something so incredibly basic, and required.
- Already done like a couple of releases ago.
- Btw, why is filepicker a toolkit thing and not something the user can choose or switch out?
  
  If the program uses xdg-desktop-portal, the file picker isn't provided by the toolkit but by your desktop / portal implementation.

I wonder if any of this will improve Wayland/mutter, I love GNOME's UI... but I had to move to KDE for a better gaming experience.
- I don’t think that’s the focus. I know you won’t like this, but the Shell is already in a good place.
  HDR is in progress. VRR does have patches In progress.
  
  If I use GNOME I get the most beautiful desktop UI, if I use Plasma I get a better gaming experience. I wish I could have both.
  
  VRR does have patches In progress.
  This has been the case for years at this point

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.
- Accesibilty is also key for automated end-to-end tests, too.

How are gnome supposed to improve hardware support? Do gnome devs write drivers and such at the present time¿?
- Variable refresh rate (VRR), HDR, OLED (e. g. I'd like the panel to become grey and move items around a bit to lessen burn-in) all involve GNOME for hardware support.
  
  Yeah I forgot about monitor support. Guess that's pretty important. But is pixel shifting gnome's responsibility or should that be done through monitor firmware so that it's OS agnostic¿?

I wonder if this has anything to do with the shaman they recently hired
- 🤣

I hope they'll ever fix the backspace issue for the on screen keyboard.

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.

Oh, good. Gnome gets more money.
- I mean... yeah?
  A major GPL software stack used by major Linux distributions getting more money to invest in accessibility tooling seems like a "good thing".
- are you trying to say that this is a bad thing?
- This but unironically. It's a very good thing.

This money would have been far better given to KDE instead of the assholes at Gnome.
- I am aware of the difference in philosophy taken by both Gnome and KDE, but would you mind elaborating on the 'assholes' bit?
  
  Calling the Arch Wiki contributor's clowns
  The public tantrum with System76 because of the poor attitudes on the part of the Gnome project
  The Gnome way: stop making shell extensions and contribute to the Shell or get fucked.
  The overall attitude of the devs regarding user opinions, resulting in the plethora of extensions available, and the tone deaf attitude regarding all of them.
  The world must be perfect before we do jack shit about fractional scaling, despite people moving to HiDPI/4K monitors.
  Trundle on over to KDE-land, and you find a very different tone. They're not too proud to adopt paradigms that conflicted with core design principles if they're widely beloved (look at Overview as a prime example). Fractional scaling is miles ahead of Gnome in functionality and performance impact, solved in both X11 and elegantly in Wayland so that xwayland apps have a hook to get correct DPI info without looking blurry. The deep customizations available have negated the need for much of their session modifications, as they rapidly adopt good ideas (floating panels anyone? Ahh yes, Plasma has got you).
  They're also extremely nimble when it comes to changing course on their backend. They went from having a buggy Wayland session to having the most stable one by far. They also take criticism far better, either taking it in stride or recognizing then they did something off-base.
  Gnome can go to hell, and fuck the stupid ass GTK which is objectively inferior to QT. Redhat can nibble on my shit too for all I care.
- How so? I miss the old gnome, but I have accepted gnome 3 for what it is. Kde was quite interesting for me back in 2012, but it didn't perform well with my old setup. What's new with kde? Id like to give it a try, but I'm too old to break my SO by having both gnome and kde on it.
  
  The KDE guys have been on fire for the past two years. Between their theming, color selection, and session handling they've come a long ways. They've also implemented some gnome-only features such as the overview, albeit in a very optional way. As opposed to eliminating a panel and forcing you to use the overview to see what applications or windows you have open, or available to launch, it's just a window management tool instead of a UX paradigm.
  Their wayland session is stable and also deals with xwayland in a very different way. If you set a custom scaling factor, the QT apps and GTK apps are talked to in a way that makes the same scaling factor consistent across all your applications, even under a wayland session with xwayland. The Gnome devs hand-wring about how the world has to be perfect before implementing an idea, where the KDE devs try something and then iterate if it's successful.

Great news! Maybe now they'll spare a day of work to get desktop icons going again. No more funding excuses for the fanboys now.
- Why would you want desktop icons? I mean I get it, there were quite popular back in the day, but I don’t see how a big junky place of a desktop has any benefit
  
  Shooting yourself in the foot to dab on the people trying to convert to linux
  
  What's the point of going against every tried and true DE experience. Why can't we just have them, disabled by default so some people don't freak out.
  
  I wonder if there's a way they could neatly implement them without cluttering the desktop. Like what if they were somewhere in the overview or something?
  
  You might not want to but the average user definitely uses that. It should be a toggle in settings for the best of both worlds
  
  I really like Gnome but requiring extensions to work properly is bad design imo.
  For example my moms laptop runs Gnome and she doesn't need much except 3 basic features: a dock, desktop & tray icons. Tray icons are necessary because Nextcloud relies on them to show the sync status, desktop icons are great to have temporary files easily accessible for a presentation.
  In my opinion the most frustrating decision of Gnime is to not allow making the "dash" permanently visible, in other words, a dock. I'd argue it's even an accessibility option because it's easier to click on something visible than having to open the overview.
  It's frustrating since Gnome is an almost perfect desktop for anyone who wants a simple, working desktop.
- No amount of funding will make native desktop icon happen if the devs simply don't want to implement then.
  
  Human ego is quite fascinating
- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2087/desktop-icons-ng-ding/
  
  For the 1000th time, those extensions aren't even close to what something really native would offer. They fail in some circumstances like drag and drop to certain plains and behave inconsistently.
- Desktop icons 🤢

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