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
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?
I never hear Gnome users crying about Valve heavily supporting KDE, so why are you angry about this?
This does not happen because Gnome is the most supported desktop environment out there, they have Red Hat, Google, Canonical, OpenSuse even Microsoft donated to Gnome. Don’t get me wrong some of this company do support kde too, but Gnome get treated in a different way because it’s the default de for most of the distros out there.
Like you said, these companies help KDE too. KDE also has more hardware partners, and more contributors.
Even ignoring all that though, it still doesn’t answer the question: why cry over Gnome getting money to aid in accessibility improvements?
I have never once heard anybody cry about the companies that support KDE, yet some people here go on like Gnome fucked their girlfriend. It’s pathetic.
Nobody’s forcing anybody to use Gnome or any any other DE. Just be happy when nice things happen in the FOSS word.
But I’m using xfce here… :‘) and It doesn’t even get some funds :’(
Wayland on XFCE is still farr farrrrrr :')
I’m not complaining about gnome getting support, I’m complaining about kde being overlooked because gnome is the default desktop for Ubuntu. Kde is just a better tool for people wanting to just get things done. Gnome is pretty I’ll give you that but ask anyone, they are very hard to work with and stubbornly refuse compromise when working with others on creating useful tools and standards.
Just think how many times they broke extensions without any regard for the individuals using it. Their efforts to make other projects wait for them to deside what’s best for gnome like they are the only desktop that matters. The projects like portals usually say their going to implement the standard despite what gnome wants and kde often helps with the brunt of that work.
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I’m not complaining about gnome getting support
You literally are.
I’m complaining about kde being overlooked
KDE isn’t overlooked. KDE gets funding too. Valve and others have put so much into KDE. KDE has the most hardware partnerships. KDE has more contributors.
Kde is just a better tool for people wanting to just get things done
In your opinion…
I do all my work on Gnome because it’s got an amazing and highly productive workflow, minimal distractions, and it’s extremely stable.
I like Plasma, I like the options it has, I have it on one of my laptops, but it’s not what I’d use for work. The last thing I need is for kwin to crash and take all the programs I had open with it, losing hours of work. Yes, I’m aware this should be fixed in Plasma 6, but as of right now it’s a massive showstopper.
stubbornly refuse compromise when working with others on creating useful tools and standards
Gnome has championed a lot of open standards, and worked with others. You’re just repeating a Reddit meme. They’ve done so much flatpak, portals, open-desktop stuff in collaboration with KDE and others.
Just think how many times they broke extensions without any regard for the individuals using it.
You’re showing a complete lack of understanding about what extensions are.
Extensions are impossible not to break from time to time. Extensions don’t use some unchanging API to work - they’re modifications on the DE itself. That’s why they’re so powerful.
There’s no way around DE mods sometimes becoming borked when the DE gets a big update.
Why are you acting like Gnome is against portals lmao, they’ve been massively pushing portals and open desktop standards, even going as far as refusing to implement features unless there’s a cross-desktop standard way of handling it (e.g. accent colours, which they are only now putting in place now that they and KDE have hammered out a sensible standard for it. Or a better system tray, which they’ve been trying to spearhead an open, cross-desktop solution for for years now, although little progress has been made by everyone). Of the DEs, Gnome has pushed for things like portals and flatpaks the most lol
We get it. In your mind, Gnome = bad and evil and nasty, KDE = good quirky and kool.
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
They are being downvoted because it is utter nonsense, spouted as authoritative fact.
Anyone who has ever used gnome seriously, knows that although it can be used for touch it is heavily keyboard oriented.
While not undermining the work of KDE devs who I have great admiration for, GNOME devs also work heavily on standards that benefit all of linux, and arguably do just as much if not more, as they are a very well resourced project.
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
You can use Fuse to encrypt files on the fly using a wide assortment of schemas. The trick is to make it available at the right time to all the desktop apps (as the environment is starting up).
All of this is available already, for example I’m encrypting the files I sync to Dropbox and I mount the decrypted version to a dir on my desktop on startup. It’s not the entire home dir but you get the idea. It’s just gonna need some polish to become really smooth and user friendly.
Im most interested in encrypted homedirs for servers. Since all my collegues are to lazy to use encrypted ssh keys, i hoped that systemd-homed makes it possible to secure them from the root user.
Is systemd-homed already useable for such usecase? If gnome will do the same for desktops, that would be a big plus, thinking about firefox profiles and such. Hopefully also using pam or kerberos for decryption.
I’ll look into fuse though, thanks for the hint
It’s usable but it comes with a fair amount of manual setup. Hopefully this is the kind of thing that Gnome will improve upon.
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.
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Wow. Thank you. Finally
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.
Yeah, i mean outside of that. General Gtk and Qt applications.
Outside of that the toolkit’s file picker is used, as the system doesn’t seem to provide one (via the portal), so the only reasonable fallback is to show the file picker that you know is there, which is the one of the application’s toolkit.
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Isn’t it only for gtk 4 applications?
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
The gap between “nothing has been done for this task” and “multiple developers have written, reviewed, and discussed patches for this” is immense and positive.
These discussions took place several years ago if I remember correctly. The problem seems to be that cursor seems to want to refresh at a different rate than the content in screen and the people at gnome want the cursor to not feel choppy by being refreshed at the vrr determined refresh rate
The MR has multiple commits about 4 months old. It’s a bummer it’s moving slow but I believe it will land someday. I hope at least.
There appears to be at least an aspirational goal for GNOME 46 to land experimental support.
I am also sure that it will land as well. As a gnome user I hope it lands sooner than later. I am just frustrated because the pursuit of perfection is keeping us from having a better experience now. It’s the calculator on iPad situation. Just because the perfect solution has not been found yet does not mean there should be no implemented solution at all.
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¿?
Your’re right, ideally wear reduction should probably be done by the display itself. But considering how little manufacuters often care about OS-agnostic approaches, it might be necessary to have software workarounds?
