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Gnome Working on Test Center App to Make Testing Easier
Quoting: Gnome Working on Test Center App to Make Testin... » Linux Magazine —
If you've ever tried to test something that was experimental, then you know how dicey it can be. A simple alpha feature can take down your entire desktop. Fortunately, in the realm of Linux, that's a rarity, but it can happen. That's why the Gnome developers are working on an app called Test Center.
The app is just in the prototyping phase, so it's not ready for real-world testing (maybe a bit of irony there). When Test Center is complete, it will allow users to install, run, and remove anything experimental on the Gnome desktop. Even better, Test Center doesn't care if the experiment is an app or something built into the system.
Test Center "...allows installing experimental apps from a sharing link provided by the app developer," the official announcement reads. It continues, "These testing apps will be clearly marked as experimental across the system, and can be set to expire after a certain test period."
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Image-Based for Developers — Modal Collective
In recent years there has been a lot of experimentation with image-based distribution formats across the Linux ecosystem, from servers and containers, to apps and the operating system itself. The advantages in terms of both robustness and security are obvious – aborted updates can no longer break the system, and it becomes possible to defend against attacks involving physical access, by implementing a measured boot mechanism. Every other consumer OS (Android, iOS, macOS, etc.) has taken this step long ago for those reasons. However, as with most shifts in technology, this change in architecture also means some workflows need to be adapted.
Over the last year, many GNOME developers have moved from traditional distributions to GNOME OS Nightly. GNOME OS is an image-based testing OS based on BuildStream and the Freedesktop SDK, using the systemd suite of tools for image-based operating systems. This has put a spotlight on some of the gaps in our software distribution and deployment story. While Flatpak has more or less solved distribution and development for apps (with some asterisks, see below), there is still a lot of work left to be done in other areas.