GNOME Desktop/GTK: Libadwaita, Maintainership of GNOME Settings, and Sam Thursfield's Work
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Libadwaita in the Wild - Purism
It’s hard to believe, but Libadwaita is not even one year old, having first been released on December 31, 2021. With that in mind it’s pretty remarkable how widely adopted it is today. Between the majority of GNOME core and Circle apps having already been ported, the many new third party apps, and even all GNOME Shell extension settings, Libadwaita is everywhere today.
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Maintainership of GNOME Settings - Georges Stavracas
GNOME Settings is one of the largest modules of the GNOME desktop. It sits comfortable as one of the bigger repositories out there. Not only that, but feature-wise, Settings is a pretty big hub of the desktop, connecting to GNOME Shell, Mutter, gnome-settings-daemon, the Bluetooth stack, NetworkManager, XDG portals, upower, CUPS, colord, online accounts, only to name a few.
Of course, such a big piece of software requires constant maintainership, issue triage, reviews, and design work. The project is virtually eternal, since it evolves with the platform, and there’s no effective point where we can call it done.
Sadly, the number of contributors and maintainers hasn’t been growing at a pace that matches the number of new features and new designs. That’s why we’re putting out a call for people to help out with this critical part of GNOME.
In the rest of this post, I’ll go through some of the current issues and how you can help.
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Status update, 15/12/2022 - Sam Thursfield
I’m commit full time at work to a project, as is normal, and a couple of spare hours a week lets me push forward a few things in GNOME.
(By the way, if you have a few hours to donate towards improving GNOME, Georges has some ideas for you).
I’ve been intermittently looking at OpenQA testing of GNOME since the summer, and I just posted a short progress report about that over on discourse.gnome.org.
I’ve also been looking at search in GNOME since about 2012, and the two things are hopefully about to converge.