• On Compiling WebKit (now twice as fast!)

  Are you tired of waiting for ages to build large C++ projects like WebKit? Slow headers are generally the problem. Your C++ source code file #includes a few headers, all those headers #include more, and those headers #include more, and more, and more, and since it’s C++ a bunch of these headers contain lots of complex templates to slow down things even more. Not fun.

• Fleet Commander is looking for a GSoC student to help us take over the world

  Fleet Commander has seen quite a lot of progress recently, of which I should blog about soon. For those unaware, Fleet Commander is an effort to make GNOME great for IT administrators in large deployments, allowing them to deploy desktop and application configuration profiles across hundreds of machines with ease through a web administration UI based on Cockpit. It is mostly implemented in Python.

• Introducing deviced

  Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been heads down working on a new tool along with Patrick Griffis. The purpose of this tool is to make it easier to integrate IDEs and other tooling with GNU-based gadgets like phones, tablets, infotainment, and IoT devices.

  Years ago I was working on a GNOME-based home router with davidz which sadly we never finished. One thing that was obvious to me in that moment of time was that I’m not doing another large scale project until I had better tooling. That is Builder’s genesis, and device integration is what will make it truly useful to myself and others who love playing with GNU-friendly gadgets.

• GNOME 3.27.90 released

• ArcMPD – An Arc-Based Translucent GTK Theme for Minimalists

  We haven’t written about any themes since 2018 began so I think it is about time that happened. That’s why I’m happy to let you in on another beautiful theme you might not have known yet – ArcMPD.

  ArcMPD is a fork of the fan favorite Arc GTK theme and its inspiration is even implied in its name. Unlike Arc GTK theme, however, it features a more transparent header, sidebar; and window control buttons reminiscent of Apple’s OS X.

• Moving a portal

  Most of the portals in use are implemented by a module called xdg-desktop-portal, with backend implementations for Gtk+ and KDE. Many of the portals in it, such as the important file chooser portal relies on a lowlevel portal called the document portal. It is a combined dbus and fuse service that controls access to files with fine-grained per-application permissions.

• Meson's dependency manager in action building GTK

  It is easy to see how this makes it easier for newcomers to participate. There are no longer pages upon pages of instructions on how to set up a build environment and so on. All that is required is to clone one Git repo and start building. The build system will take care of all the rest.

GNOME 3.28 is the next major update to the widely-used Linux desktop environment, which is now used by default in the popular Ubuntu operating system. It promises many new features, as well as a wide range of enhancements, especially under the hood as most of the components were ported to the Meson build system.

Most importantly, the beta was delayed because the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment is now using BuildStream project's build sandbox, which ensures a reliable build process regardless of the dependencies you might have installed on your GNU/Linux operating system.

Also: GNOME 3.28 Beta Released With Many Improvements

• Entering the “home stretch” for GNOME 3.28

  Earlier this week I´ve released GNOME Maps 3.27.90 (even though I just read an e-mail about the deadline for the release tarballs had been postponed for one week just after uploading the tarball).

  This weekend I (like some 8000 others) participated in an exciting FOSDEM with lots of interesting talks and the week before that I gave presentation of GNOME Maps, and in particular the public transit functionality for TrafikLab (the sort of “developer community” driven by the Swedish organization Samtrafiken AB, who coordinates and aggregates data from all public transit operators, both commercial/private and regional/public ones.

• Bastian Ilsø Hougaard: Behind the GNOME Booth, FOSDEM 2018

  Saturday was spent selling lots and lots of socks. I choose this year not to go to any talks and instead hangout with fellow GNOMEies in the booth and have a chat with bypassing users. I’m accumulating many advertising arguments for buying socks including that it allows you to have feet on your feet and that you have an excuse to say “GNOME Socks!” as much as you want, once you own a pair. Kat brought the awesome hoodies and then we had a big load of leftover t-shirts from GUADEC 2017 which we more or less sold (I think there’s still some 20 left in small). In the end we sold a 160 pairs of socks which is almost half the enormous stock of socks I purchased. When the evening came by and the booth had to close, we went to the GNOME Beer Event in La Bécasse, where I had my annual taste of Lambic Blanc, which is one of the few beers I really enjoy drinking.

• Speaking at FOSDEM 2018 in Brussels, Belgium

  I think that we in the GNOME community can use data to make more informed decisions. For example, right now we’re fading out our Bugzilla instance and we don’t really have any way to measure how successful we are. In fact, we don’t even know what it would mean to be successful. But by looking at data we might get a better feeling of what we are interested in and what metric we need to refine to express better what we want to know. Then we can evaluate measures by looking at the development of the metrics over time. Spontaneously, I can think of these relatively simple questions: How much review do our patches get? How many stale wiki links do we have? How soon are security issues being dealt with? Do people contribute to the wiki, documentation, or translations before creating code? Where do people contribute when coding stalls?

• Gnome without chrome-gnome-shell

  New laptop, has a touchscreen, can be folded into a tablet, I heard gnome-shell would be a good choice of desktop environment, and I managed to tweak it enough that I can reuse existing habits.

  I have a big problem, however, with how it encourages one to download random extensions off the internet and run them as part of the whole desktop environment. I have an even bigger problem with gnome-core having a hard dependency on chrome-gnome-shell, a plugin which cannot be disabled without root editing files in /etc, which exposes parts of my destktop environment to websites.