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
Great News!
Great news! Maybe now they’ll spare a day of work to get desktop icons going again. No more funding excuses for the fanboys now.
Why would you want desktop icons? I mean I get it, there were quite popular back in the day, but I don’t see how a big junky place of a desktop has any benefit
Shooting yourself in the foot to dab on the people trying to convert to linux
Also forcing people to go KDE to be again disappointed because their design is bad.
I really like Gnome but requiring extensions to work properly is bad design imo.
For example my moms laptop runs Gnome and she doesn’t need much except 3 basic features: a dock, desktop & tray icons. Tray icons are necessary because Nextcloud relies on them to show the sync status, desktop icons are great to have temporary files easily accessible for a presentation.
In my opinion the most frustrating decision of Gnime is to not allow making the “dash” permanently visible, in other words, a dock. I’d argue it’s even an accessibility option because it’s easier to click on something visible than having to open the overview.
It’s frustrating since Gnome is an almost perfect desktop for anyone who wants a simple, working desktop.
I use Gnome without extensions, it’s great. IMO Microsoft didn’t invent the perfect UX paradigm back in the early 90s. People use a task bar and start menu because they’re used to it, not because it’s better IMO.
I’m glad Gnome had the balls to do away with tradition and go with something different. It’s led to a much better workflow IMO.
For the 1000th time, those extensions aren’t even close to what something really native would offer. They fail in some circumstances like drag and drop to certain plains and behave inconsistently.
GNOME Extensions actually run in the gnome-shell process itself and can do most things that a builtin solution could offer.
They fail in some circumstances […] and behave inconsistently
That proves why they shouldn’t be part of GNOME Shell themselves. Offloading some (debatable) functionality to extensions helps keeping the core components reliable and maintainable.
Side note: there is also a DING implementation with supposedly better DnD support: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5263/gtk4-desktop-icons-ng-ding/
No amount of funding will make native desktop icon happen if the devs simply don’t want to implement then.
Congrats GNOME!
Does anyone know if homedir encryption will utilize systemd-homed?
My comment wasn’t meant as a jab against systemd or gnome, I was just curious if there are different solutions for an encrypted homedir.
I really like the direction linux, systemd and gnome are going! Big thank you to all the developers! <3
You can use Fuse to encrypt files on the fly using a wide assortment of schemas. The trick is to make it available at the right time to all the desktop apps (as the environment is starting up).
All of this is available already, for example I’m encrypting the files I sync to Dropbox and I mount the decrypted version to a dir on my desktop on startup. It’s not the entire home dir but you get the idea. It’s just gonna need some polish to become really smooth and user friendly.
Huge congrats on everyone who got this working. €1M will really go a long way and GNOME absolutely deserves it!
Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
I am very excite
- KDE fanboi
