• Diego Escalante Urrelo: A minimal jhbuild GNOME session in Debian

  I recently setup a GNOME development environment (after about seven years!). That meant starting from scratch since my old notes and scripts were completely useless.

  My goal for this setup was once again to have the bare minimum jhbuild modules on top of a solid base system provided by my distro. The Linux desktop stack has changed a bit, specially around activation, dbus, and systemd, so I was a bit lost on how to do things properly.

        

• Molly de Blanc: busy busy

  I’ve been working with Karen Sandler over the past few months on the first draft of the Declaration of Digital Autonomy. Feedback welcome, please be constructive. It’s a pretty big deal for me, and feels like the culmination of a lifetime of experiences and the start of something new.

  We talked about it at GUADEC and HOPE. We don’t have any other talks scheduled yet, but are available for events, meetups, dinner parties, and b’nai mitzvahs.

       

• Linux themes update – August 2020
  

  Customization plays a big part when it comes to Linux. Users around the world are using different kind of distribution and most of them really like to make their desktop look just amazing. In this monthly article, you will get to know about the new trending themes for Linux.

  So without further let’s get down to the business.

  Note: All the themes are GTK based so they shall apply on most of the desktop environments.

       

• libhandy: project update

  Since the last update, we have progressed a lot in achieving a significant milestone; that is handling multiple rows in our widget. For me working through this implementation involved understanding the GtkGrid implementation, then developing an idea around it to add the adaptive factor to our brand new widget.

  One issue that has been lingering for a while was to find a way for accepting column weights through XML layouts.

  The issue persists in the latest code, but for the time being, this is our workaround: currently, we have a weight property for every child widget (which defaults to 0) and then the column’s weight is derived from the widgets belonging to that column.
  So if widgets belonging to the same column have different weights defined in XML (or assigned programmatically), its unpredictable what weight the column will end up having. So, it is to be taken care that every widget belonging to the same column don’t have different weights.

  That does not sound good, but thankfully, Adrien recently came up with a suggestion of keeping a property which accepts comma-separated values. We will be implementing this in the coming days. This will remove the unpredictable weight issue with our current approach (Yay!).

• Implementing Recently Played Collection in GNOME Games

  In my previous blog post, I talked about how I added a Favorites Collection to Games. Favorites Collection lists all the games that’s marked as favorite. In this post I’ll talk about what went into adding a Recently Played Collection, which helps you get to recently played games more quickly.

  Since most of the ground work for supporting non-user collections are already done as part of introducing Favorites Collection, it required much less work to add another non-user collection. For Recently Played collection, the main differences from Favorites Collection in terms of implementation are...

• Core Defense offers up a different kind of Tower Defense with deck-building

  Core Defense is a Tower Defense game at it's core but it's quite unusual in how it sprinkles in the content and it's out now with full Linux support. After being in Early Access on itch.io for a few months, it's looking good.

  It takes the usual wave-based approach from your typical TD game but instead of giving you set tower types and specific placements, it's a little more open-ended. As you progress through the waves, you build up your defences based on what cards you pick as rewards, a little like a deck-builder and you use these unlocks to gradually build through the blank canvas of a map you're given.

• 4 ways to back up Steam games on Linux

  Are you a Linux gamer? Do you play a lot of Steam video games? Trying to figure out how to back up your games so you don’t have to keep re-downloading them? If so, this list is for you! Follow along as we talk about 4 ways to back up Steam games on Linux!

• Monster Crown has a new adult take on Pokemon and it's now in Early Access

  With a darker tone, a setting aimed at adults and creatures that might give a few pixelated nightmares, Monster Crown has entered Early Access as a new breed in the genre of monster catching.

  Monster Crown definitely captures some of the spirit of early Pokemon games, with a new and unique take on it. Instead of throwing a magical ball to capture creatures and force them to your will, Monster Crown gets you to offer them a contract and see if they want to join you. It's a little odd but an interesting spin.

Today I released GNOME Gingerblue version 0.2.0 with the basic new features...

[...]

The GNOME release team complained at the early release cycle in July and call the project empty, but I estimate it will take at least 4 years to complete 4.0.0 in reasonable time for GNOME 4 to be released between 2020 and 2026.

• GNOME OS Images Available For Testing

  GNOME OS as the Linux build with bleeding edge GNOME software for testing continues taking shape and a call for testing has been issued.

  For GNOME module maintainers and other interested individuals, a call for testing of GNOME OS was issued today for the latest operating system images.

  While GNOME OS is improving with its hardware support, this call for testing is focused on using GNOME Boxes or other virtualization software for firing up this bleeding-edge version of GNOME.

• GNOME OS call for testing (+BuildStream workshop)

  Hi all,
  
  As most of you have probably heard by now, our nightly VM images are
  ready for wider testing. I'd like to ask at least maintainers of GNOME
  core modules to test it.
  
  Core modules are defined in
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/tree/master/elements/core
  I'd also like to request maintainers of core modules to review the way
  their modules (and their dependencies) are built, and file bugs if the
  apps doesn't work correctly or would prefer it to be built with a
  different set of options.
  
  The image can be downloaded from
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/jobs/artifacts/master/raw/image/disk.img.xz?job=vm-image-x86_64
  
  To run it with you distro version of gnome-boxes (or anything that
  uses libvirt), first decompress it, then run:
  virt-install --name GNOMEOS --boot uefi --video virtio --memory 2048
  --import --disk disk.img
  
  To run it in nightly flatpak of gnome-boxes, decompress and convert to
  qcow2 using:
  qemu-img convert disk.img disk.qcow2
  then from gnome boxes, add a new virtual machine, select "GNOME
  Nightly x86_64" and select the qcow2 image.
  
  The image uses the "user" variant by default, and can be updated using
  GNOME Software, or using the command line:
  sudo ostree admin upgrade
  
  If you'd like to try the developer image, use
  sudo ostree admin switch GnomeOS:gnome-os/master/x86_64-devel
  you can switch back to  the user image using
  sudo ostree admin switch GnomeOS:gnome-os/master/x86_64-user
  
  Lastly, I'd like to announce that we're going to do an informal
  workshop on using BuildStream to develop GNOME components starting at
  16:00 UTC on the GUADEC platform. That's about 3 and half hours from
  now.
  
  Regards,
  
  Abderrahim
  

• Proposed GNOME Patches Would Switch To Triple Buffering When The GPU Is Running Behind

  The latest GNOME performance work being explored is effectively how to make the Intel graphics clock speed ramp up quicker when necessary. Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt is working on a set of patches for enabling triple buffering with Mutter when the GPU starts falling behind and that additional rendering work in turn should ramp up Intel GPUs to their optimal frequency in order to smooth out the performance.

  Daniel has been working on various GNOME desktop optimizations focused primarily on Intel graphics and at 4K. He had been seeing the modern Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver at times delivering lower performance than the classic "i965" driver. On investigation, he found that it wasn't due to the OpenGL driver per se but the iGPU was running in a lower clock/performance state.