The firmware which drm/kms drivers need is becoming bigger and bigger and there is a push to move to generating a generic initramfs on distro's builders and signing the initramfs with the distro's keys for security reasons. When targetting desktops/laptops (as opposed to VMs) this means including firmware for all possible GPUs which leads to a very big initramfs. This has made me think about dropping the GPU drivers from the initramfs  and instead make plymouth work well/better with simpledrm (on top of efifb). A while ago I discussed making this change for Fedora with the Red Hat graph ..read more

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 19 to April 26. GNOME Core Apps and Libraries GTK Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Matthias Clasen says GTK 4.15.0 is out. This release changes the default GSK renderer to be Vulkan, on Wayland. Other platforms still use ngl. The intent of this change is to get wider testing and verify that Vulkan drivers are good enough for us to rely on. If significant problems show up, we will revert this change for 4.16. You can still override the renderer choice using the GSK_RENDERER environment ..read more

This is a project update for the SGS Pilot 1 project. This is a WMF funded project  (ID: 22444585). They have been created two relevant places: Phabricator: VerySmallGLAM · Workboard Meta: Very Small GLAM You can observe que are now using the coined term «Very Small GLAM». This will be the activity scope from now as we consider it short and and precise. The Small GLAM Slam denomination will be kept for the ID: 22444585 project. What the Very Small GLAM term refers to? It identifies GLAM entities of very small size. How small? We got the inspiration from the concept of VSE (very small ..read more

It’s been around 6 months since the GNOME Foundation was joined by our new Executive Director, Holly Million, and the board and I wanted to update members on the Foundation’s current status and some exciting upcoming changes. Finances As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to ..read more

The GNOME Foundation invites bids for hosting GUADEC 2025. For next year’s annual gathering of GNOME users and developers, we’re looking for location proposals from anywhere in the world. This is your chance to bring GUADEC to your city! If you are interested in submitting a proposal to host GUADEC 2025 in your city, please submit an intention to bid by filling out this short form. Intent to Bid submissions are due by end-of-day May 3, 2024. Final proposals should be submitted using our online form and are due by May 31, 2024. Be prepared to include the following details in your proposal: Lo ..read more

The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 46, ‘Kathmandu’. This release brings remote login with RDP, variable refresh rates (VRR), many accessibility improvements, enhanced notifications, and improved Settings. The Files app comes with a new global search and many other enhancements, and a whole slew of new apps have joined GNOME Circle. To learn more about the changes in GNOME 46 you can read the release notes. GNOME release notes You can also watch our release video. GNOME release video GNOME 46 will be available shortly in many distributions, such as Fedora 40 and U ..read more

It’s no secret I have way more projects to manage than hours in the day. I hope to rectify this by sharing more knowledge on how my projects are built. The most important project, Builder, is quite a large code-base. It is undoubtedly daunting to dive in and figure out where to start. Here is a sort of engineers journal (PDF) in book form about how the components fit together. The writing tries to be brief and to the point. You can always reference the source code for finer points. There is so much more that can happen with Builder if we have regular contributors and subsystem maintainers. We ..read more

One of the things we’re tackling as part of the STF infrastructure initiative is improving notifications. Other platforms have advanced significantly in this area over the past decade, while we still have more or less the same notifications we had since the early GNOME 3 days, both in terms of API and feature set. There’s plenty to do here The notification drawer on GNOME 45Modern needs As part of the effort to port GNOME Shell to mobile Jonas looked into the delta between what we currently support and what we’d need for a more modern notification experience. Some of these limitations are s ..read more

In the 80s and 90s software development landscape was quite different from today (or so I have been told). Everything that needed performance was written in C and things that did not were written in Perl. Because computers of the time were really slow, almost everything was in C. If you needed performance and fast development, you could write a C extension to Perl. As C was the only game in town, anyone could use pretty much any other library directly. The number of dependencies available was minuscule compared to today, but you could use all of them fairly easily. Then things changed, as they ..read more

Wedding Anniversary; 22 years of happiness. Off to see R&A's new daughter; exciting. Caught up with blog in the car, up-loaded some slides on background save from COOL days ..read more