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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Gnome has the best accessibility tools for disabled people
It’s often glossed over
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.
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.
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?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the shaman they recently hired
🤣
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!
Congrats GNOME!
Does anyone know if homedir encryption will utilize systemd-homed?
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 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.
Wow, 1M it’s a lot! I wish we could have more organizations like this in more countries.
I’m very interested in the secrets storage. Hopefully that includes integrating programs with GNOME Secrets, especially firefox
Great News!
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
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Isn’t it only for gtk 4 applications?
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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and optimally performant DE
Except it’s the worst DE in terms of performance. Using KDE instead of Gnome made a big difference in my weaker laptop.
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GNOME is the best performing modern DE outside of lightweight nice DEs.
This is straight up not true, GNOME is a memory hog and uses almost twice as much as KDE. I’m idling ~4% CPU usage on an i5 7300HQ, which is just barely better than yours. There’s a reason the Steam Deck opted to use KDE and not Gnome.
KDE is an absolute mess and is a hobbyist DE in comparison to the professional GNOME.
As someone who used gnome for two years, hell no. Gnome is trying too hard to be minimalist and is lacking basic features that you have to use extensions for. Extensions which, by the way, break each update and have their own bugs. I also had to use gnome tweaks for basic crap like disabling mouse acceleration. KDE is a much more polished experience for people who actually use computers, but gnome is okay if you’re just looking for something simple that looks smooth.
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