The System76 team has returned from GUADEC and successfully recovered from crippling jetlag! (Mostly.) Based on many constructive conversations that took place over the course of the conference, we’re very excited about GNOME’s future and eager to see how the project progresses. Here’s what we learned:

Theming

Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation moderated a vendor theming BoF on the final day of GUADEC. The meeting was attended by members of the GNOME design team, application developers, and theme developers from Ubuntu and Pop!_OS. The objective was to address developer concerns about inconsistency in themes that can cause app breakage. Ultimately, we arrived at a compelling solution that we believe works for GNOME, application developers, and distributions alike.

First, we’ll work together to identify and document colors that can be exported and modified by theme developers. These include header bars, buttons, switches and other widgets that theme developers often modify. This work also enables app developers to more easily customize the look and feel of their apps.

With that work completed, we’ll be able to identify “upstreamable” styles that theme developers would like supported. These might include rounded corners and flatter buttons.

The early work is promising and we’re optimistic. We already have an early prototype of the Pop!_OS theme, which strongly resembles the look and feel of our current theme. There’s still progress to be made, but GNOME’s strategy on theming has a lot of potential to provide a more flexible, higher quality desktop experience. It’s a shining example of what happens when the community comes together to solve a problem.



Flatpak

Also key to the event was the development of Flatpak, an explanation on how it works, and information on flat-manager. A new tool for Flatpak, flat-manager allows anyone to create their own Flatpak repository. Through this tool, Linux distributions would be able to curate their own set of applications for their users, the kind of customized targeting that can strengthen a distro’s identity.

In addition, new “Portals” were demonstrated for Flatpak. Portals allow applications to request permission to access areas of hardware and software outside of the application itself. As an example, if an application is told to take a screenshot, a dialogue will come up to get the user’s permission to do so. This would bring an extra layer of functionality to applications and open the doors for a variety of features.

Upcoming improvements

GNOME 3.34 and GTK 4 are chock-full of improvements. Users can look forward to higher performance, along with smoother animations as a result of reduced frame-dropping. While we don’t want to spoil too many details surrounding these releases, be on the lookout for more GNOME features on the way!

GNOME is the product of many talented minds working together, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to be involved in a community where we can constantly learn from one another. Our team had a lot of fun seeing our friends in the GNOME community. Work on these improvements has already begun. So far it’s promising, and we can’t wait to share it with you all once it’s ready.

