GNOME Recognized as Public Interest Infrastructure

The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.

This investment will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:

  • Improve the current state of accessibility
  • Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
  • Encrypt user home directories individually
  • Modernize secrets storage
  • Increase the range and quality of hardware support
  • Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience
  • Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
  • Consolidate and improve platform components
mellejwz,

I hope they’ll ever fix the backspace issue for the on screen keyboard.

Sentau,

How are gnome supposed to improve hardware support? Do gnome devs write drivers and such at the present time¿?

fossisfun,
@fossisfun@lemmy.ml avatar

Variable refresh rate (VRR), HDR, OLED (e. g. I’d like the panel to become grey and move items around a bit to lessen burn-in) all involve GNOME for hardware support.

Sentau,

Yeah I forgot about monitor support. Guess that’s pretty important. But is pixel shifting gnome’s responsibility or should that be done through monitor firmware so that it’s OS agnostic¿?

fossisfun,
@fossisfun@lemmy.ml avatar

Your’re right, ideally wear reduction should probably be done by the display itself. But considering how little manufacuters often care about OS-agnostic approaches, it might be necessary to have software workarounds?

InstallGentoo,

I wonder if this has anything to do with the shaman they recently hired

lemmy_nightmare,
@lemmy_nightmare@sh.itjust.works avatar

🤣

danielfgom,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

I hope they also look at Linux Mint and the Cinnamon desktop. It’s massively popular and that team work very hard. I’m sure they could use that support to help them focus on improving Cinnamon, the toolkit, accessibility etc.

Happy for Gnome though, they are a long standing project and used by many distro’s. I have used Gnome in the past and it’s decent, although a little heavy on RAM.

Would be great to see Debian also get this, being one of the oldest Linux distro’s and the basis for Ubuntu, which in turn has spawned many distros.

Shadywack,
@Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

This money would have been far better given to KDE instead of the assholes at Gnome.

MadBigote,

How so? I miss the old gnome, but I have accepted gnome 3 for what it is. Kde was quite interesting for me back in 2012, but it didn’t perform well with my old setup. What’s new with kde? Id like to give it a try, but I’m too old to break my SO by having both gnome and kde on it.

Shadywack,
@Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

The KDE guys have been on fire for the past two years. Between their theming, color selection, and session handling they’ve come a long ways. They’ve also implemented some gnome-only features such as the overview, albeit in a very optional way. As opposed to eliminating a panel and forcing you to use the overview to see what applications or windows you have open, or available to launch, it’s just a window management tool instead of a UX paradigm.

Their wayland session is stable and also deals with xwayland in a very different way. If you set a custom scaling factor, the QT apps and GTK apps are talked to in a way that makes the same scaling factor consistent across all your applications, even under a wayland session with xwayland. The Gnome devs hand-wring about how the world has to be perfect before implementing an idea, where the KDE devs try something and then iterate if it’s successful.

unexpectedteapot,

I am aware of the difference in philosophy taken by both Gnome and KDE, but would you mind elaborating on the ‘assholes’ bit?

Shadywack,
@Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

Trundle on over to KDE-land, and you find a very different tone. They’re not too proud to adopt paradigms that conflicted with core design principles if they’re widely beloved (look at Overview as a prime example). Fractional scaling is miles ahead of Gnome in functionality and performance impact, solved in both X11 and elegantly in Wayland so that xwayland apps have a hook to get correct DPI info without looking blurry. The deep customizations available have negated the need for much of their session modifications, as they rapidly adopt good ideas (floating panels anyone? Ahh yes, Plasma has got you).

They’re also extremely nimble when it comes to changing course on their backend. They went from having a buggy Wayland session to having the most stable one by far. They also take criticism far better, either taking it in stride or recognizing then they did something off-base.

Gnome can go to hell, and fuck the stupid ass GTK which is objectively inferior to QT. Redhat can nibble on my shit too for all I care.

andruid,

Awesome stuff! This is something that major already know, but governments are learning. You can actually invest in FOSS, and unlike renting software you can make improvements that will better fit what you need it to do and not have to pay more for privilidge in the future.

And for everyone saying KDE as opposed to Gnome, they work together you dinguses! It’s a friendly competition at times, but being FOSS they can and do easily learn and grow from each other.

Pantherina,

I prefer KDE currently, because

  • normal application tray and buttons for close, maximise and minimize
  • dolphin ! (But any capable filemanager with spacesaving UI, extensions, an editable location bar, drag/drop dialogs, selection mode, preview, pinned favourites, kfind integration,… would do)
  • spectacle
  • kate
  • systemsettings (keyboard shortcuts, theming, mouse speed, Graphic tablet, flatpak permissions, system info, …)

are all simply better than the GNOME counterpart. Also things like the clickboxes of decorations actually reaching to the top corner is something so obvious its crazy that GNOME simply ignores that and you need to directly point to the “x”.

I like that Gnome is untraditional though.

M137,

As the first paragraph says: “The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.”

Let’s hope that means improving all that.

stockRot,

Windows XP’s grip ever tightens well past its death

HiddenLayer5, (edited )

Good design is good design.

Pantherina,

Did the windows before not have regular menu with all that? I think its an okay concept, even though I can imagine something like workspaces could make sense too.

ILikeBoobies,

Gnome has the best accessibility tools for disabled people

It’s often glossed over

milicent_bystandr,

I’m also on KDE at the moment, but I appreciate the money going into FOSS desktop experience. Most importantly as keeping things viable for the future. Also KDE and GNOME both, one presumes, learn from each others successes.

GrappleHat,
@GrappleHat@lemmy.ml avatar

This is fantastic! Gnome is such a great project! Well done!

This will sound silly, but I didn’t realize that governments support open source like this. But it’s such a good idea! It’s similar to governments funding a park or a road any other public resource. Open source projects fit very nicely there!

Vincent,

Great work by Sonny and Tobias. Really happy to hear that more effort will be invested into accessibility, as I feel it's really been lagging over the past couple of years.

barryamelton,

Accesibilty is also key for automated end-to-end tests, too.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

GNOME is well deserving as the most polished and optimally performant DE. GNOME is so good, Windows 11 copied its workflow, layouts and even the taskbar right-click menu with 23H2.

simple,

and optimally performant DE

Except it’s the worst DE in terms of performance. Using KDE instead of Gnome made a big difference in my weaker laptop.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

GNOME is the best performing modern DE outside of lightweight nice DEs. KDE is by far the worst alongside Deepin. KDE is so crap, I had to turn off all the animations and compositor to bring CPU usage from 70 to 10-15%. This was a stock Debian 12 KDE setup on i5-7200U. GNOME in comparison idles at 1-2%, max 3%. XFCE and LXQt sit around 0.5-1%.

KDE is an absolute mess and is a hobbyist DE in comparison to the professional GNOME.

simple,

GNOME is the best performing modern DE outside of lightweight nice DEs.

This is straight up not true, GNOME is a memory hog and uses almost twice as much as KDE. I’m idling ~4% CPU usage on an i5 7300HQ, which is just barely better than yours. There’s a reason the Steam Deck opted to use KDE and not Gnome.

KDE is an absolute mess and is a hobbyist DE in comparison to the professional GNOME.

As someone who used gnome for two years, hell no. Gnome is trying too hard to be minimalist and is lacking basic features that you have to use extensions for. Extensions which, by the way, break each update and have their own bugs. I also had to use gnome tweaks for basic crap like disabling mouse acceleration. KDE is a much more polished experience for people who actually use computers, but gnome is okay if you’re just looking for something simple that looks smooth.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

GNOME is a memory hog and uses almost twice as much as KDE

It is unfortunate that every GNOME critic lives in 2015, and stick to those unhinged biases.

Steam Deck’s decision to use KDE has nothing to do with performance, but with customisation of UI, which is also why they use custom compiled Arch to modify every nook and corner of what Deck runs.

7300HQ has about 1.7-2x the performance of 7200U, according to PassMark. cpubenchmark.net/…/Intel-i5-7300HQ-vs-Intel-i5-72…

KDE is a much more polished experience for people who actually use computers, but gnome is okay if you’re just looking for something simple that looks smooth.

Its cool and hipster to be delusional, but when things get professional and you want stability and performance, GNOME is unbeatable. Nobody in the real world cares about the fancy one zillion features of KDE outside hipster hobbyists.

caesaravgvstvs,

Sovereignty from whom though??

Turns out, the Germans.

Seems like a cool initiative

twei,

yes, we are quite good at funding foss

pingveno,

Sovereignty as in it is sponsored by or own by a nation-state. Similarly, Norway has a sovereign wealth fund derived from its oil profits.

caesaravgvstvs,

Yes! I just kinda posted it as a rethorical question. I think it’s important to know where the money is really coming from :)

Shatur,
@Shatur@lemmy.ml avatar

Wow, 1M it’s a lot! I wish we could have more organizations like this in more countries.

Cossty,

Will we finally get properly working system tray? Man can dream…

TheGrandNagus,

They’ve been trying to make a cross-desktop standard for a little while now, but progress is certainly slow :/

ikidd,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Oh, good. Gnome gets more money.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Unless its sarcasm, GNOME is well deserving as the most polished and optimally performant DE. GNOME is so good, Windows 11 copied its workflow, layouts and even the taskbar right-click menu with 23H2.

Patch,

I mean… yeah?

A major GPL software stack used by major Linux distributions getting more money to invest in accessibility tooling seems like a “good thing”.

aes,

From what I remember, Gnome has consistently been the most accessible DE for a while now.

Imagine you’re a government investing in public infrastructure and have two options to choose from. Why would you choose the option that alienates a bunch of citizens from using it OOTB when the alternative is just as functional and already accessible to those same citizens?

twei,

are you trying to say that this is a bad thing?

TheGrandNagus,

This but unironically. It’s a very good thing.

warmaster,

I wonder if any of this will improve Wayland/mutter, I love GNOME’s UI… but I had to move to KDE for a better gaming experience.

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