If you follow Planet GNOME, you?ll know about Jim Hall?s fantastic usability testing work. For years Jim has spearheaded usability testing on GNOME, both by running tests himself and mentoring usability testing internships offered through Outreachy.

This Autumn, Jim will once again be mentoring usability testing internships. However, this time round, we?re planning on running the internships a bit differently.

In previous rounds of usability testing, the tests have typically been performed on released software: that is, apps and features that are already in the hands of users. This is great and has flagged up issues that we?ve gone on to fix, but it has some drawbacks.

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There’s lots of work in progress UX work in GNOME right now, all of which would benefit from testing. This includes the new menu arrangements that are replacing app menus, new sound settings, new design patterns for lists, new application permission settings, the new lock screen design, and more.

GNOME's Mutter window manager / compositor picked up Meson build system support today and in the process received various clean-ups like dropping OpenGL ES 1.x support.

While most GNOME components have been switched over to offering Meson build system support for months as an alternative to Autotools, only in the latest Mutter Git code as of today is Meson support for this key component to the GNOME desktop.

As the third and final day of the PipeWire hackfest draws to a close, I thought I’d summarise some of my thoughts on the goings-on and the future.

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One key thing that PulseAudio does right (I know there are people who disagree!) is having a custom configuration that automagically works on a lot of Intel HDA-based systems. We’ve been wondering how to deal with this in PipeWire, and the path we think makes sense is to transition to ALSA UCM configuration. This is note as flexible as we need it to be, but I’d like to extend it for that purpose if possible. This would ideally also help consolidate the various methods of configuration being used by the various Linux userspaces.

To that end, I’ve started trying to get a UCM setup on my desktop that PulseAudio can use, and be functionally equivalent to what we do with our existing configuration. There are missing bits and bobs, and I’m currently focusing on the ones related to hardware volume control. I’ll write about this in the future as the effort expands out to other hardware.

For Pipewire, the policy decisions would be split off from the main daemon. Pipewire, as it gains PulseAudio compatibility layers, will grow a default/example policy engine that will try to replicate PulseAudio's behaviour. At the very least, that will mean that Pipewire won't regress compared to PulseAudio, and might even be able to take better decisions in the short term.

For GNOME, we still wanted to take control of that part of the experience, and make our own policy decisions. It's very possible that this engine will end up being featureful and generic enough that it will be used by more than just GNOME, or even become the default Pipewire one, but it's far too early to make that particular decision.

In the meanwhile, we wanted the GNOME policies to not be written in C, difficult to experiment with for power users, and for edge use cases. We could have started writing a configuration language, but it would have been too specific, and there are plenty of embeddable languages around. It was also a good opportunity for me to finally write the helper library I've been meaning to write for years, based on my favourite embedded language, Lua.

So we kicked off the PipeWire hackfest in Edinburgh yesterday. We have 15 people attending including Arun Raghavan, Tanu Kaskinen and Colin Guthrie from PulseAudio, PipeWire creator Wim Taymans, Bastien Nocera and Jan Grulich representing GNOME and KDE, Mark Brown from the ALSA kernel team, Olivier Crête,George Kiagiadakis and Nicolas Dufresne was there to represent embedded usecases for PipeWire and finally Thierry Bultel representing automotive.

The event kicked off with Wim Taymans presenting on current state of PipeWire and outlining the remaining issues and current thoughts on how to resolve them. Most of the first day was spent on a roadtable discussion about what are and should be the goals of PipeWire and what potential tradeoffs there would be going forward. PipeWire is probably a bit closer to Jack than PulseAudio in design, so quite a bit of the discussion went on how that would affect the PulseAudio usecases and what is planned to ensure PipeWire works very well for consumer audio usecases.

Personally I ended up spending quite some time just testing and running various Jack apps to see what works already and what doesn’t. In terms of handling outputing audio with Jack apps I was positively surprised how many Jack apps I was able to make work (aka output audio) using PipeWire instead of Jack, but of course we still have some gaps to cover before PipeWire is ready as a drop-in Jack replacement, for instance the Jack session management protocol needs to be implemented first.

Various Linux audio stakeholders are in Edinburgh having a PipeWire hackfest following the Linux Foundation events that took place last week.

While PipeWire is mostly talked about these days on the video side for being part of the technology to allow for Wayland remote desktop handling on KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell desktops as well as being important for Flatpak app sandboxing, part of the longer-term vision at Red Hat is on seeing PipeWire also be a success on the audio front.

This short tutorial explains in brief to customize elementary OS 5.0 with Capitaine icons + Elementary-X theme combo. You see, this will make your OS looks like Apple macOS smoother. This combo is really beautiful, thanks to Keefer Rourke and Suraj Mandal, the talented developers of the respective artworks. I also mention here a one-liner command so you can test this in instant (i.e. one tap on LiveCD session). Okay, enjoy this customization!

If you are fond of dark theme whether it's your personal liking or for comfort of your eyes, then you landed on the right page. Today, we introduce you to the very elegant theme called "Nordic". This Gtk theme is created using the awesome Nord color pallete which looks amazing on the desktop, it is released under GNU General Public License V3. Nordic also pack theme for Gnome Shell, and support almost every desktop environment such as Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, Mate, Budgie, Panteon, etc. If you are using distribution other than Ubuntu/Linux Mint then download the theme directly from its page and install it in this location "~/.themes" or "/usr/share/themes". Since Nordic theme pack is in active development that means if you find any kind of bug or issue with it then report it to get fixed.