GNOME and KDE Updates

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 31, 2023

• GNOME Software Fix Reduces Background CPU Usage

  The latest version of GNOME Software uses fewer resources when idle.

• Tim F. Brüggemann: Bi-weekly GSoC Update: Reaching FlatSync's MVP

  In this post, I want to sum up the latest events regarding GSoC and FlatSync, and what's been done to reach our project's MVP goal.

  # Latest GSoC Updates

  We participants were invited to a Contributor Summit where tips and tricks regarding GSoC and open-source involvement were shared. We heard talks from previous contributors, mentors as well as Google employees regarding OSS and its development flow. Alongside many other topics, the importance of communication was highlighted a lot. But other than just keeping up-to-date with our mentors, we were encouraged to also engage in a wider range of communication, so e.g. within the org's community, be that through chats like Matrix rooms, project issues and MRs or blogging. Many other topics were being discussed as well, but this would probably go a little too far for this blog entry.

• My work in KDE for May 2023

  I can't believe it’s already the end of May! This month turned out a little meatier than last month I think, but I still have a large backlog of merge requests and TODOs to go through.

• Memory Disks

  Not a moment after I had walked out the door to catch a train to Berlin for the KDE e.V. board sprint (May 2023), there was a local power failure which took down my in-house IT. That wouldn’t be so bad, except it did not come back up. Cue gnashing of teeth from the people who stayed at home (but, really, should have been able to hack into the router to fix it).

  [...]

  In rc.conf there are dozens of system-configuration variables that you can set. It’s still old-school SysV initialization, and I like it like that.

  Here is what I added to /etc/rc.conf:

  varmfs=YES
  varsize=256M
  varmfs_flags='-S -k /var.md/'
  

  The configuration says to use a memory-disk for /var, that it should be 256MiB large (plenty, and still acceptable within the 3GiB memory size of the H6), without softupdates (a BSD UFS tweak) and using /var.md as “skeleton”. That means that the memory disk is populated from the contents of /var.md when it is created.

  With this setup, I have writable storage that is not persistent and that does not wear our the SD card, with minimal impact on the rest of the system – and it is simple to switch back if necessary.