Personal website & development blog
Last Saturday we celebrated the release of GNOME 3.28. It was a bit late, but happened nonetheless!
And even cooler than that: this was not the only Release Party around! Isaac Ferreira also organized a successful one in Recife, Pernambuco!
GNOME is getting some traction in Brazil again – stay tuned 😉
Greetings GNOMErs!
Last week, when I upgraded to GNOME 3.28, I was sad to notice an extremely annoying bug in Mutter/GNOME Shell: every once in a while, a micro-stuttering happened. This was in additions to another bug that was disappointing me for quite a while: the tiling/maximize/unmaximize animations were not working on Wayland too.
About the former, it may not look like the end of the world, but trust me when I say that a split-second delay every ~10s is the perceived difference of a butter smooth and a trashy experience.
Of course, this is free software, we are free people, and I have this habit of fixing up whatever is bothering me. Naturally, I decided to fix them. I decided to document my journey for people that want to try Mutter/GNOME Shell development be less scared.
I decided to start working on the animations, since there was a comment written by Jonas Ã…dahl to bug 780292 that was a leading clue to whatever the issue was. Time to open GNOME Builder, and clone Mutter.
While testing these changes, I obviously needed to run Mutter and see what was happening. Since we’re talking about Wayland, I was specifically interested in seeing which messages were being sent by the application and which message Mutter was receiving.
To dump the Wayland calls made by an application, we can just use the WAYLAND_DEBUG env var, like this:
$ WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 <application>
This should dump a lot of information into the terminal. This might or might not be useful to you.
One obvious way to test changes in Mutter is to build and install Mutter system-wide, then reboot. Rebooting takes almost 5 minutes to me. Clearly not a good approach. But Mutter has a nested mode where it can run inside another Mutter session.
To run a nested Mutter Wayland session:
$ mutter –nested –wayland
If your changes are making Mutter crash, you might want to run it with GDB. But Mutter is built with Autotools, which of course makes every single thing more complicated than it should be. You’ll notice that src/mutter is not an executable, but a wrapper script. To run Mutter under GDB, do that:
$ libtool –mode=execute gdb mutter
(gdb opens)
> r –nested –wayland
This will open a window with your new raw Mutter session. To run any graphical application against this new nested Mutter, as long as the toolkit supports Wayland, run:
$ WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 <application>
This was the trickiest part to me. Mutter has some env vars to control debugging, but I could not use them properly. Either it would dump too much info, or nothing useful at all.
I then decided to go the dumb way and just add dozens of prints around the code.
If you’re aware of any better way to do that, please leave a comment!
The root of the issue was in this function:
static void
zxdg_surface_v6_set_window_geometry (struct wl_client *client,
struct wl_resource *resource,
int32_t x,
int32_t y,
 int32_t width,
int32_t height)
{
MetaWaylandSurface *surface = surface_from_xdg_surface_resource (resource);
surface->pending->has_new_geometry = TRUE;
surface->pending->new_geometry.x = x;
surface->pending->new_geometry.y = y;
surface->pending->new_geometry.width = width;
surface->pending->new_geometry.height = height;
}
Can you spot the issue here?
…
Look again.
Notice that Mutter is accepting whatever the new geometry is. It doesn’t check if the new geometry differs from the current. When the geometry doesn’t change, we should not report anything to the compositor. If the compositor is GNOME Shell, things get even worse: we go through the JS trampoline, which is slow, when could have avoided it.
Apparently, GTK reports geometry changes even when they don’t happen, e.g. when hovering whatever area of the window. Every single one of these hundreds of geometry changes that didn’t actually change per second would go though IPC to Mutter, which will mindlessly jump into the compositor’s JS trampoline just to do… nothing. Because the geometry didn’t actually changed.
This was fixed by this commit.
The second point that was actually freaking me out was that Mutter was waking up my discrete GPU quite often. On a PRIME system, this means the GPU is put to sleep after a few seconds without being used. Every wakeup would produce an incredibly annoying stutter.
This was only happening on Wayland.
After further investigation, I came up with this temporary fix until Mutter becomes smarter about how it should handle GPUs. This one is already merged, and will be available on the next GNOME 3.28 release!
Oh, dear, the infamous memory leak… I’ll just leave this link to the GitLab comment. Go figure.
Greetings GNOMErs,
It’s been a long time I don’t write here. These past months were excruciatingly busy and intense, and lots of things happened but I didn’t manage to keep up with the blog posts. I’ll try to condense everything that happened and is still happening and will happen here.
I spent a good part of January polishing and fixing bugs in Calendar and To Do. Just to name a few:
I’m feeling a bit pressured to put these apps in a good shape for GNOME 3.28, specially To Do, since it was selected to be installed by default on Ubuntu and I don’t want the new users having a bad and unstable experience. I also don’t want to deal with hundreds of possibly bugs after the release.
I’ve been working a lot recently on GNOME Settings, and reviewed (quite literally) more than a hundred patches in the past couple of weeks. Lots of interesting stuff landed:
Now, something happened to Settings these days; it lost its maintainer. I’ve been trying to act as a maintainer during this blackout, and I’d be happy to continue doing that. Fortunately, there are many other heroes involved (shouts to Bastien Nocera, Debarshi Ray, Robert Ancell, Julian Sparber, Ondrej Holy, and many others for your contributions and being great maintainers.)
Hopefully Settings is already in a good shape for 3.28, and will get even more solid in the following weeks.
Big news: I’ve finished writing my Masters’ thesis, and it’s over now. It was a hell of a ride, and seeing in retrospective, I think enrolling a Masters did me more harm than good.
I’m finishing it with a bittersweet taste in my mouth; I’ve learned a lot, but, for many reasons, it was a bad experience overall that led me to a few burnouts and episodes of night terror and depression. I made the mistake of not stopping when I should, and advancing in this shitswamp had pretty catastrophic implications, including physical ones (in one of these nights of terror, I cut my own hand with a knife, and it was painful to use the computer for a couple of weeks.)
It is now over, and I’ll need to recover from the past 2.5 years. Which leads us to…
But hey, it’s only for a month! I’ll be taking some weeks off and disconnecting from everything (including GNOME, Endless, family and everything else), a time that I’ll spend backpacking through some places around the world. I’ll refrain to tell where since I want to avoid being recognized (it’s not like I’m famous, but who knows!). I’ll be with my wife, and only her, during this period.
I just hope my apps don’t fall apart during this time. For someone who is routinely connected and helping others on IRC channels, disconnecting will be an interesting experience; perhaps agonizing in the first few days, but only time will tell.
So, see y’all in a month I guess? 🙂
Greetings my GNOME friends!
It’s been a long time with no news. I guess work and masters are really getting in the way… good news is that I’ll finish masters in 2 months, and will have some free time to devote to this beloved project.
“Bad” news is that, after almost 6 years, I’ll finally take some time to have a real vacation. I’ll stay 3 weeks out of the loop in February, a time where I’ll be traveling to the other side of the world, watching the sunset at the beach with my wife. Without a computer. While it’s unfortunate to the community, I think this time is necessary for my mental health – I’ve gone way too many times through the almost-burned-out state recently.
But even with all of these thing in our way, thanks to the help of awsome old and new contributors, Calendar and To Do received a lot of new features!
Lets begin with my beloved Calendar. My focus for the past weeks was rewriting the Month view. It was a hard, painful process, but I can say for sure now that, of the very few responsive widgets in GNOME, the Month view is the best one! 😛
The most substantial changes were:
Of course, no words can make people as excited as a sequence of pictures! Lets check this out:
The animations were implemented usuing the animation framework in libdazzle, all thanks to Christian Hergert’s work on GNOME Builder. Kudos!
For the next cycle, thanks to the hard work of a new and awsome contributor Florian Brosch, this is what’s coming next:
We’re on track to land the features that were proposed for this cycle. You can check out the plans at the Roadmap page of Calendar. You can also get help us with these tasks with design, code and testing!
GNOME To Do also received a lot of attention already. We’re going through a big redesign, thanks to the leading design work of Tobias Bernard, and the results are already gratifying.
The immeditaly noticeable change is the tasklist view:
The rows are entirely draggable now. I’ll continue working on these features, but more importantly, I want people to take some of this work over and contribute to the project!
Talking about managing tasks, GNOME To Do was moved to GitLab! I can’t state how much of an improvement it is over the previous Bugzilla approach. We now have an updated and organized Kanban Board:
The reason for that is to have a consolidated workflow:
So far, the experience with this workflow has been outstanding. We were able to find out much more bugs due to QA being a first-class citizen in the process. Filing bugs is now a breeze too! There are bug templates already available, and I took the burden and made a colossal cleanup and organization of the bug list:
I encourage everyone to not trust me and go check it out: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-todo. The downside is that I’m feeling incredibly demotivated to check Calendar bugs in Bugzilla now 😦
While many of these changes are super exciting, this is just the first part of the cycle. There are much more to work on, and the more people get involved, the more we will accomplish. Things are moving in a fast pace, and I’m incredibly happy with the direction of these projects.
To help pushing community involvement, I went ahead and wrote a page describing how can you help testing. With Flatpak, this is ridiculously easy – and yet, absolutely necessary! So, don’t hesitate to get in touch and help us shaping the next GNOME version.
See you all around o/
Last week I gave a Flatpak workshop at Latinoware, one of the biggest South American Free Software meetings.
It was a triuph! The room was fully loaded, and everyone (almost 30 people!) managed to create their own Flatpak repository and their own Flatpak app.
You can find my slide deck here (in Brazilian Portuguese).
And of course, we went to the Iguaçu Falls with our new friends:
This whole journey was sponsored by my employer Endless, thank you so much!
A late night announcement: the improved tiling patches (shown in a previous blog post) were merged in Mutter and and GTK+3, and will be available in GNOME 3.26.1 / GTK 3.22.23 (not yet released; should be available this week).
I’d like to thank Florian Muellner, Matthias Clasen, Jonas Adahl and AlexGS for all their support, time, code reviews and testing.
Have a wonderful night!
Greetings, GNOME friends!
I’m a fan of productivity. It is not a coincidence that I’m the maintainer of Calendar and To Do. And even though I’m not a power user, I’m a heavy user of productivity applications.
For some time now, I’m finding the overall experience of GNOME To Do clumsy and far from ideal. Recently, I received a thank you email from a fellow user, and I asked they what they think that could be improved.
It was not a surprise when they said To Do’s interface is clumsy too.
That motivated me to experiment and bother our designers about ways to improve GNOME To Do. With the great help of Tobias Bernard, a super awsome contributor, we could figure out a way to improve the current situation.
One of the problems of GNOME To Do was the translucent task rows. Priorities would be semi-transparent colors applied on top of transparent rows.
Of course this mess could lead to things like this:
After some investigation, a lot of experimentation and feedback from multiple design team members, we could come up with this:
I personally think this is a small, but huge improvement over the previous state. When you have to stare at tasklists for hours, the minor annoyances are what causes the biggest frustrations.
Another big aspect of To Do that was the task editor panel. This was initially made based on some old mockups, but this proved to not be the ideal experience.
The biggest problem was that there were no connection between the editor and the task. Of course there is an arrow pointing to the task row, but consider that:
So Tobias suggested me inline editing of tasks. I went ahead and implemented it, and the result looked actually very good!
The necessary width was reduced, and now the window can be shrinked to small sizes. And it works nicely on Dark Themes too:
This work already landed on master, and will be part of GNOME To Do 3.28. And, of course, our traditional sequence of images:
Any comments? Thoughts? Please let me know in the comments! And don’t ever forget, you can always get involved – you just need to get in touch, and join us at #gnome-todo at irc.gnome.org.
Enjoy!
We had a Release Party in São Paulo, Brazil. It happened at the release day, and it was absolutely great:
And we had a super awsome cake too!
What else could we ask for? 🙂
Greetings!
I am incredibly excited for GNOME 3.26, and it’s been hard to wait for it. I openly admit this fact. This release saw serious, important improvements all over the places, new features landed, some others didn’t, thousands of bugs were fixed all across the platform, and I’d like to share my personal highlights for this release.
As the result of a successfull Google Summer of Code project from Yash Singh, Calendar now supports events with recurrences. So far he did an outstanding job! There ain’t no secret in using it, and in fact it should be as simple as one could expect. Here’s a small video showcasing this new feature:
Another successful Summer of Code project from Rohit Kaushik introduced Todoist integration. This was made in cooperation with a GNOME Recipes intern, and many improvements to the entire stack landed.
What can we say about Christian Hergert’s work on GNOME Builder? It’s simple wonderful! This cycle, GNOME Builder received a redesign UI, code indexing, documentation cards, debugging capabilities and a great fullscreen mode. The code highlight is working like a charm too.
After using Builder for a couple of years now, I can finally say that, as a user of the application, it now covers all of my big needs. I am really happy to see how Builder is coming along, and how my development workflow was improved by this tool. Really, it allows me to code much faster now!
Thanks Christian, you deserve all the best!
Games is an app that I have a love and hate relationship. I love how simple and straightforward and powerful it is – specially because I love retro games – but I hate how it tempts me to spend my time playing instead of working.
I think Games is the GNOME app that makes the best usage of Tracker currently. It literally just works. I can plug my joystick, select a game and play it. And, because it uses libretro, I can play the games I love the most: Playstation games. Even the ones with multiple disks!
Thanks Adrien for creating this great app 🙂
I didn’t say this before, but nowadays I only use the unstable version of GNOME apps through Flatpak’s Nightly channel. Also, I run Steam and Spotify through Flathub.
It works like magic. Almost literally.
You should give it a try.
When I wrote my impressions about the 3.24 release, I was really frustrated about the overall experience of 3.24. Having a session that crashes every 2 minutes when you already have your own tight deadlines didn’t help.
Things improved drastically during the cycle, of course – thanks to the tireless efforts of Philip Chimento. He was brave to make himself responsible for a very core component (GJS) and work on it. He fixed all the worst bugs already, and the JS platform is finally advancing again thanks to him. We should really get him a drink, don’t you agree? 🙂
And I now realize that I wrote about those issues in the worst possible way I could’ve. And, from the very bottom of my heart, I beg the pardon of the community about that.
Sorry, folks.
This cycle, I did a few things that I’m happy. Specially because I myself will benefit from them as well! 🙂
You’re probably aware of it already, but GNOME Control Center’s UI was revamped and rebranded as “Settings”. I think that this rebrand, together with GNOME Tweak Tools becoming “Tweaks”, make it clearer and more obvious the different purposes of those apps.
The panels are now much more consistent, and the overall experience should be more streamlined now. It’s looking simple and intuitive, and yet we present the same ammount of features! I wrote about it in this blog post. Even though this work was huge, and I am feeling mentally tired after this battle, I’m also very happy we managed to get this done for 3.26.
Thanks for everyone involved!
This was one tiny contribution from my side, and Christian was the one that actually made it great. But it makes Builder much more usable on a standard 1366×768 screen, where I can’t half-tile it. This is how it used to look like:
Yay!
Another cycle, another round of performance improvements in GNOME Music. This time, an issue in the Album Art loading code was killed with fire. Check this out:
This is complicated. As you know, I’m not a window manager expert. And Mutter is huge, with dozens of edge cases that I didn’t know of. This led to me spending a stupidly long time testing a high number of different setups and configurations.
The good news: the patches are working.
The bad news: they couldn’t make it for 3.26.
Depending on the willingness of Florian, and the acceptance of the Release Team, I can try and request a feature freeze break for 3.26.1, but there of course is a chance that this is not going to be accepted. Which is totally reasonable, few people are willing to introduce potentially buggy new features in stable releases.
Even if it doesn’t make for 3.26, I’ll continue to work towards quarter tiling and we, at the very least, can expect it to be very well tested for 3.28.
I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions. What are your impressions about this GNOME release? Drop a comment below!
(English version after the Portuguese one)
Fala galera, tudo bem?
Teremos uma pequena festa de lançamento do GNOME 3.26 + 20 anos do GNOME em São Paulo. É uma celebração da comunidade para a comunidade, organizada pela comunidade. Graças ao nosso querido colega Derek Stavis, temos um excelente local para realizar a celebração – marquem aà em suas agendas:
Todxs serão muito bem vindxs. Basta me mandar o nome completo, e o número de um documento de identidade (RG ou CPF).
Se puderem, levem salgados, sucos e/ou doces.
Abraços
(English version below)
Greetings community!
We’ll have a small 3.26 release + 20 years party in São Paulo. It’s a celebration of the community to the community by the community. Thanks to the almighty Derek Stavis, we’ve got an excellent venue – write it down on your calendars:
Everyone is more than welcomed. Make sure to send me your full name, and an identity number (RG or CPF).
You’re encouraged to bring snacks and juices.
