Hello community,

I have big good news to share with you. You might know we have been working for years on materializing what we wanted the future of contribution to be, we did multiple iterations and we worked full time on our developer experience… and finally, I’m glad to announce, we achieved it, we have a new way to contribute to GNOME!

One image says more than 1000 words, the whole process of contributing to GNOME is as easy as you will see, all documented in the new newcomers wiki

No specific distribution required. No specific version required. No dependencies hell. Reproducible, if it builds for me it will build for you. All with an UI and integrated, no terminal required. Less than five minutes of downloading plus building and you are contributing.

Can you imagine how this changes the GNOME contribution story? We went from requiring either latest Fedora or Ubuntu, fighting dependencies and random issues, taking more than 80 modules to build just for contributing to a single app. It was a pain.

As an example, Nautilus with the previous tool and workflow took around 6 hours the first time if no issues were present. Now it’s 5 minutes, with no possible build issues (forgive exceptions in the rule 🙂 ).

I think we just opened a new world for contributors.

The work behind it

Of course, a change as big as this didn’t come overnight, this is possible because GNOME and sponsors put the time and resources on it, with rock-stars like Alex Larsson creating Flatpak and Christian Hergert creating Builder, working both for years nonstop in these technologies, with no short term benefit.

Finally the benefit is here, the future we imagined and shaped 5 years ago is coming together, and it’s shining.

Thanks a lot to the people involved, also specially Bastian Ilso for his guidance, design and writing of the new wiki guide.

Hope you enjoy all the work we did, I’m looking forward for your feedback and to fix the issues you may find (contact us in IRC in #newcomers). And soon, to have your first contribution with GNOME done 🙂

PD: Please follow the newcomers wiki to have it working, lot of work to make this happen was done in Flatpak 0.9.1, when Ubuntu 16.04 has 0.8.4 for now, so we say to use a PPA for have it updated. I tested thoughtfully in Ubuntu 16.04 and Fedora 25, and it works out of the box following the wiki making sure Flatpak is updated. Thanks all for the feedback so far! 🙂

PD2: I just realized I had a small error when doing the switch to the new wiki and the instructions for Ubuntu 16.04 and PPA got lost. Now it’s fixed, try again and tell us how it goes! 🙂

PD3: Cool video of Jono Bacon showing what Endless does with the same technology https://twitter.com/jonobacon/status/817059475437879305