#LASGNOME

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GUADEC Conference Summary 2018

GNOME Users and Developers Europe Conference 2018

Table of Blog Contents:

Cool Stuff from the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting

Topics From the Conference Talks

Lightning Talks

The Good Stuff: Projects from the Unconference Workshops

Advisory Board Meeting This was our first year attending GNOME’s Users and Developers Conference in Europe. Before the conference start, we were scheduled to attend the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board meeting. We were excited to meet the other board members from the community and learn about their current projects, especially to learn if there was any overlap on projects that we could collaborate together on. The other board members include representatives from: GNOME, Debian, Private Internet Access, Canonical, Endless, Red Hat, Suse, Free Software Foundation, and The Document Foundation.

^ Coolest group of people.

During this meeting, GNOME shared some of the list of upcoming conferences and projects, including:

UX Hackfest, November 2018

GNOME Asia (user focused), August 11-13 Taipei 

Libre Application Summit (LAS) GNOME, Sept 6-9 Denver → Hosting this. Let’s elevate Linux apps!

Outreachy → get more people involved

FOSDEM, Feb 2019 Brussels 

GUADEC (developer focused), 2019 

Since Libre App Summit is in Denver, they’re hoping we can give a tour of the manufacturing space. Hopefully the space is ready to present to the public by then.

Gitlab

GNOME also talked about their switch to Gitlab. Their GNOME Director of Operations said, “..And [GNOME] did this before switching to Gitlab ‘was considered cool.’” Here is a video that GNOME and Gitlab made together about their partnership: 

General

Talks of keeping a list of hackfest spaces available on a website so that developers know hackerspaces local to them. We loved this idea!

Talks to promote desktop remote work experience - Have Linux supersede in remote work capabilities.

GNOME presented their board information during the GUADEC conference as well: 

Conference Talks

The talks overall were general updates about various pieces of the GNOME ecosystem, and what different individuals had been working on in the past year. Here are some talks that stood out:

The future of GTK

This status update focused on what’s coming next with GTK4 with regards to themability, app menus, new widgets, and more. There are several new widgets coming that we’re excited to try out, including the GtkPicture and GtkVideo widgets; we can definitely see a place for them providing rich graphics and animations throughout Pop!_OS, like in our installer, for example. The information about porting from GTK3 to GTK4 was also helpful, since we now maintain and ship a number of GTK3 apps in Pop!_OS.

Tests, profiling, and debugging Nautilus:

Tests help find performance issues, regressions, easier debugging, and finding memory leaks. Started by looking at sync vs async, modularity, refactoring for readability, etc.

GNOME Usage:

Interested in power management in Linux. “Batteries are efficient, but they’re not smart enough.” Usage is designed to tell its users (i.e. developers) what hardware and software is responsible for battery usage. Windows uses “Battery engine,” Android handles via kernel, and iOS also tracks it. Prospective design from Allan Day includes a chart of usage over time. reach.aditya.here@gmail.com

Librehunt: A website to help you choose a Linux distro. To help users new to Linux. https://gitlab.com/aviwad/librehunt

How to take over GNOME:

GUADEC helped Tobias (of Purism) start contributing. He started working on design projects (Todo, Fractal, App Menu), and then was hired by Purism to work on Librem 5. Kind of an interesting case study.

Freedesktop-sdk, the future of Linux runtimes (Aud)

This is all about FreeDesktop.org efforts for cross-distro and cross-desktop compatibility, something that will become increasingly important as we tailor the UX of Pop!_OS while leaning on the GNOME and Open Source community for applications and tools.

Building the Libre Desktop Computer

We gave a talk about building the libre computer, explaining what a computer containing all open parts could create for the future of open source. We presented where we’re at in launching the desktop. This is our first time announcing details on the open desktop to the public. The talk is viewable on Youtube. 

You can subscribe to receive updates on the open computer at: https://thel.io/

Lightning Talks

-Our UX Architect, Cassidy Blaede, presented on technical vs. social problems in app design. This is a talk that he wants to expand on for the LAS conference taking place in Denver this September. 

-Daniel Foré of elementary gave a talk on thinking about “the user as your romantic partner.” Advices product designers/developers to apply dating advice when engaging their users.

-Robert Ancell shared his work on a fun robot project for kids by making a Raspberry Pi based Python IDE that runs over SSH—the UI is done entirely in the TTY, and so you can remote into the robot and do all the coding directly. It was a pretty stark contrast to the gamified code learning tools we’ve seen from other people, and really demonstrated that there are different effective approaches to teaching kids how to use these powerful tools.

-Britt gave a talk about being an audiologist PhD student using all sorts of open source software and 3D printed research parts—he mentioned that the big “med tech” companies are so proprietary that it’s common for medical students and researchers to default to open tools instead. This really validates what we’re doing with Pop!_OS and was really cool to hear straight from someone in the field.

-Robin from Endless had one of the most popular lightning talks. She presented a walkthrough of UX testing and design practices, and how those methods can and should change throughout the development cycle. She plans to present a full-length version of her talk at LAS conference in Denver, and we can’t wait to hear it!

Workshops and New Projects Derived from Conference

GTK BoF:

Following up on the GTK talk, we attended the GTK BoF and workshop. It was mostly focused on release planning and low-level implementation ideas, but still valuable. There’s some new diff-based frame redrawing and other optimizations that should be good for performance and power consumption, which is always important to us.

Multiple Displays BoF:

BoF on this topic can be found at the GUADEC Wiki. We hosted a conversation about how we can improve the multi-displayexperience in Mutter, Shell, and Settings. Some suggestions from the discussion included looking into contextual feature options that detect the type of display, for example: a projector detection could enable a “Presentation Mode,” possibly including the Do-Not-Disturb feature that we debuted in Pop!_OS. We also talked about upstreaming much of the work we’re doing in the HiDPI Daemon to Mutter itself, and we were thrilled to hear that Marco had been exploring similar work in Mutter already. We look forward to collaborating closer with the GNOME and Mutter folks in these areas.

Action Items for the team:

DavidJordan record how the current daemon works

Work with/talk to JonasAdahl about the Mutter-level things we could work on

CassidyJames research customers, synthesize data, and work with GNOME Design team on the future

Theming & Ecosystem BoF:

How do we improve user experience despite different themes, multiple apps? The goal of this talk was to discuss how to provide a predictable platform for developers to build on. Complete notes on the talk are available on the wiki.

While we track GNOME changes very closely and are constantly dogfooding the Pop! stylesheet, a proposed standardized theming API for Adwaita could deliver more guarantees about things not breaking in third-party apps and between major Pop!_OS releases. The GNOME design team wants to hear from downstreams like Ubuntu and Pop!_OS about what sorts of things we theme, and how it differs compared to Adwaita. We plan to work together to figure out the best way forward.

Some GNOME designers are also working on a new icon style that looks much more modern in visual style while not clashing so much with general popular third-party apps (like the slightly flatter Firefox, Spotify, VS Code, etc.). Incidentally, this new GNOME icon style looks much closer to Pop!_OS icons, which could lead to some interesting things in the future. Stay tuned!

Action Items for the team:

Reach out to Tobias to follow up with GNOME Design and Adwaita team.

We are looking forward to making progress on these projects with the community. We are hoping to reconnect with some folks at Libre Application Summit this September. We’ll keep you posted! In the meantime, we hope to see you at LAS!