GNOME Weekly Update: From Homed Encryption to WebKit Efficiency

The GNOME project has witnessed a whirlwind of activity this week, with developers contributing to various aspects of the GNOME ecosystem. This week's update covers the integration of 'homed' for enhanced user account security, performance optimizations in WebKitGTK impacting GNOME Web, and a look at various Sovereign Tech Fund-backed initiatives.

We break down the latest developments in accessibility, security, and core application updates. Let's go!

Table of Contents

• Sovereign Tech Fund Driving Progress
• Beyond the Core: Apps, Libraries, and Third-Party Projects*
• Nurturing Future Contributors: Google Summer of Code

Sovereign Tech Fund Driving Progress

The GNOME Foundation, in collaboration with the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), is making significant strides towards achieving the following key objectives:

• Enhanced User Security: A key area of focus is bolstering user security. The transition from AccountsService to homed for managing user accounts is well underway. This shift is pivotal as homed introduces individual user home directory encryption, paving the way for a more secure and flexible platform in the future.
• Modernizing Platform Infrastructure: GNOME's platform infrastructure is undergoing a modernization drive, with noteworthy advancements in GTK and libadwaita. These efforts are spearheaded by Alice, whose contributions include addressing issues in Dialog, essential for a refined user experience. Further improvements target the notification system, aiming to streamline how applications deliver notifications while prioritizing accessibility and consistency across different desktops.
• Seamless User Experience: Andy's work on an intents system aims to elevate the user experience by enabling native apps to interact with HTTPS URLs seamlessly. This development promises smoother interaction between applications and web content.
• Robust Development Tooling: Significant progress is being made in enhancing the quality assurance and development tooling. Adrian Vovk is leading the charge in advancing sysupdate, sysupdated, and systemd-repart. These tools, crucial for system updates and disk management, are being fortified with Varlink support, a protocol optimized for early boot environments, further solidifying GNOME's robustness.
• Prioritizing Accessibility: GNOME remains committed to inclusivity, evident in the continuous efforts to improve accessibility. Joanie's dedication is evident in the cleanup of Orca's code, enhancing its efficiency, and the ongoing work to enable new keygrabs, further improving the platform's usability for everyone.
• Security at the Forefront: Modernizing security components is paramount, and Dhanuka is leading this initiative by extending the oo7 Rust library. This endeavor aims to replace the aging gnome-keyring and libsecret with a modern, well-maintained solution, bolstering the security of secrets management within the GNOME ecosystem.
• Strengthening Wayland/Flatpak Security: Georges is instrumental in enhancing the security of Wayland and Flatpak. His contributions include releasing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and making significant strides in documenting the accessibility landscape of Flatpak. Moreover, his dedication extends to merging crucial accessibility-related patches for projects like xdg-dbus-proxy, flatpak, and WebKit, demonstrating a holistic approach to security and inclusivity.

Beyond the Core: Apps, Libraries, and Third-Party Projects*

While the core GNOME platform receives significant attention, the broader ecosystem, including applications, libraries, and third-party projects, is also buzzing with activity.

• WebKitGTK Enhancements: Michael Catanzaro's valuable contribution to WebKitGTK tackles a memory leak issue, ensuring smoother performance and optimized resource utilization in the upcoming 2.44.3 release.
• GNOME Web Browser Sees Major Upgrades: GNOME Web, the platform's native browser, has seen substantial improvements. The introduction of an automatic form filler, based on Abdullah Alansari's work, enhances user experience. Arak's contributions improve bookmark sorting, making navigation more intuitive in version 47 beta. Lastly, the addition of a Privacy Report dialog by Jan-Michael Brummer increases transparency regarding the Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature, providing users with greater control over their online privacy.
• libspelling Gets a Performance Boost: libspelling, crucial for spellchecking, has received a performance upgrade with support for off-main-thread operation, enhancing responsiveness when dealing with large documents. This improvement is readily noticeable in applications like Text Editor and Builder, which rely on libspelling for their spellchecking functionality.
• gtk-rs 0.9 and gtk-rs-core 0.20 Released: gtk-rs 0.9 and gtk-rs-core 0.20 are now available, coinciding with the GNOME 47 release. These updates focus on providing bindings to new APIs and refining existing ones. The release also sees compatibility updates for related crates such as gstreamer-rs, gst-plugins-rs, and libadwaita, ensuring a cohesive developer experience.
• Third-Party Projects Flourish: Embellish, a nerd fonts manager, reaches version 0.3.0, incorporating updates like migration to AboutDialog and a streamlined interface for managing fonts. Similarly, GNOME Network Displays (GND) releases version 0.93.0, introducing VAH264 gstreamer hardware encoding support and addressing several key issues. The project is actively seeking contributors to help integrate it more closely with GNOME Shell and GNOME Control Center, highlighting the collaborative spirit within the GNOME community.

Nurturing Future Contributors: Google Summer of Code

GNOME's commitment to fostering new talent is evident in its active participation in Google Summer of Code. The "Ignored Apps" project, mentored by Cogitri, is nearing completion, aiming to provide users with granular control over application synchronization. The project, with contributions from IlChitarrista, has benefited from design input from Jamie Gravendeel and technical guidance on Adwaita and GTK from Alice Mikhaylenko. This initiative exemplifies GNOME's dedication to creating a welcoming and supportive environment for budding developers.

This post highlighted just a snapshot of the activity within the GNOME project. For a deeper dive into specific areas or to track ongoing development, refer to the full "This Week in GNOME" update in the following link:

• This Week in GNOME - Web Happenings

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