Greetings GNOMEies

This year, I had the pleasure to attend GUADEC at Almeria, Spain. Lots of things happened, and I believe some of them are important to be shared with the greater community.

GUADEC

This year’s GUADEC happened in Almería, Spain. It turns out Almería is a lovely city! Small and safe, locals were friendly and I managed to find pretty good vegan food with my broken Spanish.

I was particularly happy whenever locals noticed my struggle with the language, and helped and taught me some handy words. This alone was worth the entire trip!

Getting there was slightly complicated: there were no direct flights, nor single-connection routes, to there. I ended up having to get a 4 connection route to there, and it was somewhat exhausting. Apparently other people also had troublesome journeys there.

The main accommodation and the main venue could have been closer, but commuting to there was not a problem whatsoever because the GUADEC team schedule a morning bus to there. A well handled situation, I must say — turns out, commuting with other GNOME folks sparked interesting discussions and we had some interesting ideas there. The downside is that, if anyone wanted the GNOME Project to die, we were basically in a single bus 😛

Talks

There were quite a few interesting talks this year. My personal highlights:

• GTK4 Lightning Talks by Benjamin Otte
• The infamous GNOME Shell performance by Carlos Garnacho and Jonas Ådahl
• Product Management in Open Source by Nick Richards
• JavaScript in GNOME in 2018 by Philip Chimento
• Have you ever developed for a GPU? by Benjamin Otte

BoFs

To me, the BoFs were the best part of this year’s GUADEC. The number of things that happened, the hard talks we’ve made, they all were extremely valuable. I think I made a good selection of BoFs to attend, because the ones I attended were interesting and valuable. Decisions were made, discussions were held, and overall it was productive.

I was particularly involved in five major areas: GNOME Shell & Mutter, GJS, GTK, GNOME Settings, and GNOME To Do.

GNOME Shell & Mutter

A big cleanup was merged during GUADEC. This probably will mean small adaptations in extensions, but I don’t particularly think it’s groundbreaking.

At the second BoF day, me and Jonas Ådahl dived into the Remote Desktop on Wayland work to figure out a few bugs we were having. Fortunately, Pipewire devs were present and we figured out some deadlocks into the code. Jonas also gave a small lecture on how the KMS-based renderer of Wayland’s code path works (thanks!), and I feel I’m more educated in that somewhat complex part of the code.

As of today, Carlos Garnacho’s paint volume rework was merged too, after extensive months of testing. It was a high-impact work, and certainly reduces Mutter’s CPU usage on certain situations.

At the very last day, we talked about various ideas for further performance improvements and cleanups on Mutter and GNOME Shell.  I myself am on the last steps of working on one of these ideas, and will write about it later.

As I sidenote, I would like to add that I can only work on that because Endless is sponsoring me to do that. Because

Exciting times for GNOME Shell ahead!

GJS

The git master GJS received a bunch of memory optimizations. In my very informal testing, I could measure a systematic 25~33% reduce in the memory usage of every GJS-based application (Maps, Polari and GNOME Shell). However, I can’t guarantee the precisions of these results. They’re just casual observations.

Unfortunately, this rework was making GNOME Shell crash immediately on startup. Philip Chimento tricked me into fixing that issue, and so this happened! I’m very happy with the result, and looks like it’ll be an exciting release for GJS too!

Thanks Philip for helping me deep dive into the code.

GTK

Matthias already wrote an excellent write-up about the GTK BoF, and I won’t duplicate it. Check his blog post if you want to learn more about what was discussed, and what was decided.

GNOME Settings

At last, a dedicate Settings BoF happened at the last day of the conference. It had a surprisingly higher number of attendees than what I was expecting! A few points on our agenda that were addressed:

• Maintainership: GNOME Settings has a shared maintainership model with different levels of power. We’ll add all the maintainers to the DOAP file so that anyone knows who to ping when opening a merge request against GNOME Settings.
• GitLab: we want to finish the move to GitLab, so we’ll do like other big modules and triage Bugzilla bugs before moving them to GitLab. With that, the GitLab migration will be over.
• Offloading Services to Systemd: Iain Lane has been working on starting sessions with systemd, and that means that we’ll be able to drop a bunch of code from GNOME Settings Daemon.
• Future Plans: we’ve spent a good portion of this cycle cleaning up code. Before the final stable release, we’ll need to do some extensive testing on GNOME Settings. A bit of help from tech enthusiasts would be fantastic!

We should all thank Robert Ancell for proposing and organizing this BoF. It was important to get together and make some decisions for once! Also, thanks Bastien for being present and elucidating our problems with historical context – it certainly wouldn’t be the same without you!

GNOME To Do

Besides these main tracks, me and Tobias could finally sit down and review GNOME To Do’s new layout. Delegating work to who knows best is a good technique:

I was also excited to see GNOME To Do stickers there:

It’s fantastic to see how GNOME To Do is gaining momentum these days. I certainly did not expect it three years ago, when I bootstrapped it as a small app to help me deal with my Google Summer of Code project on Nautilus. It’s just getting out of control.

Epilogue

Even though I was reluctant to go, this GUADEC turned out to be an excellent and productive event. Thanks for all the organizers and volunteers that worked hard on making it happen – you all deserve a drink and a hug!

I was proudly sponsored by the GNOME Foundation.