The Gnome project is 20!

In July 2017, new and old members of the GNOME community met in Manchester to discuss the future of the Linux desktop at the latest edition of GUADEC, the annual GNOME Conference.

While the schedule was packed with great talks, the highlight of the week was undoubtedly the main event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the GNOME Project, enhanced by the presence of one its co-founders, Federico Mena Quintero.

With Ubuntu having recently decided to move to the GNOME 3 desktop, and Endless re-basing their desktop to a more recent version, 2017 is turning out to be a year of reunification for the project, bringing new energy and excitement that could be felt throughout the conference and a united GNOME platform for developers to build on.

A number of improvements targeting app developers were discussed during the conference, notably Flatpak, a system to package and deploy desktop apps. Now getting to the point where it can be used by developers, one of its great features is that it’s containerised, meaning that one can safely run untrusted apps from any website while almost eliminating the risk of malware. It also defines a standard format for repositories, which, along with allowing for the creation and use of multiple app stores, also means distributions will be able to create their own app store as well.

GNOME’s developer infrastructure is also about to enter a new phase. After spending the last two decades using Bugzilla, GNOME launched a pilot project to move to GitLab, the open source git repository manager and issue tracker. Received enthusiastically by the community, this project is especially promising thanks to the supportive developers at GitLab, one of which was present at the conference to answer a range of questions on their software.