Further investments in desktop Linux

This was originally posted on the GNOME Foundation news feed

The GNOME Foundation was supported during 2020-2021 by a grant from Endless Network which funded the Community Engagement Challenge, strategy consultancy with the board, and a contribution towards our general running costs. At the end of last year we had a portion of this grant remaining, and after the success of our work in previous years directly funding developer and infrastructure work on GTK and Flathub, we wanted to see whether we could use these funds to invest in GNOME and the wider Linux desktop platform.

We’re very pleased to announce that we got approval to launch three parallel contractor engagements, which started over the past few weeks. These projects aim to improve our developer experience, make more applications available on the GNOME platform, and move towards equitable and sustainable revenue models for developers within our ecosystem. Thanks again to Endless Network for their support on these initiatives.

Flathub – Verified apps, donations and subscriptions (Codethink and James Westman)

This project is described in detail on the Flathub Discourse but goal is to add a process to verify first-party apps on Flathub (ie uploaded by a developer or an authorised representative) and then make it possible for those developers to collect donations or subscriptions from users of their applications. We also plan to publish a separate repository that contains only these verified first-party uploads (without any of the community contributed applications), as well as providing a repository with only free and open source applications, allowing users to choose what they are comfortable installing and running on their system.

Creating the user and developer login system to manage your apps will also set us up well for future enhancements, such managing tokens for direct binary uploads (eg from a CI/CD system hosted elsewhere, as is already done with Mozilla Firefox and OBS) and making it easier to publish apps from systems such as Electron which can be hard to use within a flatpak-builder sandbox. For updates on this project you can follow the Discourse thread, check out the work board on GitHub or join us on Matrix.

PWAs – Integrating Progressive Web Apps in GNOME (Phaedrus Leeds)

While everyone agrees that native applications can provide the best experience on the GNOME desktop, the web platform, and particularly PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) which are designed to be downloadable as apps and offer offline functionality, makes it possible for us to offer equivalent experiences to other platforms for app publishers who have not specifically targeted GNOME. This allows us to attract and retain users by giving them the choice of using applications from a wider range of publishers than are currently directly targeting the Linux desktop.

The first phase of the GNOME PWA project involves adding back support to Software for web apps backed by GNOME Web, and making this possible when Web is packaged as a Flatpak.  So far some preparatory pull requests have been merged in Web and libportal to enable this work, and development is ongoing to get the feature branches ready for review.

Discussions are also in progress with the Design team on how best to display the web apps in Software and on the user interface for web apps installed from a browser. There has also been discussion among various stakeholders about what web apps should be included as available with Software, and how they can provide supplemental value to users without taking priority over apps native to GNOME.

Finally, technical discussion is ongoing in the portal issue tracker to ensure that the implementation of a new dynamic launcher portal meets all security and robustness requirements, and is potentially useful not just to GNOME Web but Chromium and any other app that may want to install desktop launchers. Adding support for the launcher portal in upstream Chromium, to facilitate Chromium-based browsers packaged as a Flatpak, and adding support for Chromium-based web apps in Software are stretch goals for the project should time permit.

GTK4 / Adwaita – To support the adoption of Gtk4 by the community (Emmanuele Bassi)

With the release of GTK4 and renewed interest in GTK as a toolkit, we want to continue improving the developer experience and ease of use of GTK and ensure we have a complete and competitive offering for developers considering using our platform. This involves identifying missing functionality or UI elements that applications need to move to GTK4, as well as informing the community about the new widgets and functionality available.

We have been working on documentation and bug fixes for GTK in preparation for the GNOME 42 release and have also started looking at the missing widgets and API in Libadwaita, in preparation for the next release. The next steps are to work with the Design team and the Libadwaita maintainers and identify and implement missing widgets that did not make the cut for the 1.0 release.

In the meantime, we have also worked on writing a beginners tutorial for the GNOME developers documentation, including GTK and Libadwaita widgets so that newcomers to the platform can easily move between the Interface Guidelines and the API references of various libraries. To increase the outreach of the effort, Emmanuele has been streaming it on Twitch, and published the VOD on YouTube as well.