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Smarter half tiling in GNOME Shell/Mutter

Posted on by feaneron

Hello GNOMErs,

I think that, at this point, at least a good part of the community is aware of the many new features that are planned to arrive with GNOME 3.26.

I’m particularly looking forward a better tiling story in GNOME Shell and Mutter.

And, y’know, I’m not exactly a referrence in being passive about my own personal technological wishes. Heck, I love hacking stuff so much that it naturally happens even when I’m sleepless and under headache. Perhaps we can call that organic hacking? 🙂

Anyway, I can’t just sit down and keep waiting for something I could work on, right?

And that’s why this happened:

This is obviously a work in progress. You can track the progress of this smarter half tiling in bug 645153. But, sssshhh don’t tell anyone, this is actually part of the future quarter tiling feature!

Have a wonderful night! o/

GNOME To Do 3.24 release, and it’s shining

Posted on by feaneron
startup notification

GNOME To Do is a personal task manager for GNOME. It uses GNOME technologies and integrates very well with the desktop. And now, it’s finally being released!

The 3.24 version comes with a few nice features and, most importantly, whole load of bugfixes. Let’s get started!

Autostart & notifications

GNOME To Do now (optionally) autostarts once you log in and keeps track of your tasks! This is what I see now when I log into my laptop:

startup notification
Thanks for letting me know, To Do!

To Do also detects when you put your machine to suspend, and if you resume in the next day, another notification is triggered. Isn’t it nice when your task management tool allows you to focus more on actually working on your tasks than in managing them? I certainly love not having to worry about the tasks for the next day 🙂

This behavior, of course, is optional and configurable. There is a new “Run in background” plugin that allows you to fine-tune this behavior:

Editing plugin options
Editing “Run in background” plugin options

Improved panels

A lot of bugfixes landed for Today, Scheduled and Unscheduled panels. The most important one in my opinion is the ability to select which tasklist the new task will be added. Check this out:

selecting the tasklist
Selecting the tasklist in Today panel

These panels also don’t show the date anymore. It’s not very useful to show “Today” in every task, when you’re already in Today panel, right? The same logic applies to the Scheduled panel, where you can see the date already:

scheduled panel
It looks very nice!

Todo.txt integration

Thanks to our awsome new contributor, Rohit Kaushik, we now have Todo.txt integration! This is disabled by default (it still need some polishing) but you can easily test it by running the autogen script like:

$ ./autogen.sh --enable-todo-txt-plugin

Now you can just enable it in the Extensions dialog:

Captura de tela de 2017-04-24 09-33-32
Enabling the Todo.txt plugin

Select a Todo.txt file (you have to create on manually if you don’t have one):

Selecting a Todo.txt file
Select a Todo.txt file

And you can use it just like a regular tasklist!

Todo.txt + GNOME To Do
It works 🙂

Thanks Rohit!

A few considerings

A few new features were showcased in this blog post, but to me, the topmost important change is the stability of GNOME To Do. I’ve been using it regularly for the past couple of weeks and it’s pretty stable, but I know that bugs are there, just waiting for someone to trigger them.

If you see To Do crashing or behaving oddly, please file a bug at the gnome-todo product in GNOME Bugzilla. And make sure to join #gnome-todo room at GNOME IRC and say hi. With your help, we can make GNOME To Do the best personal task manager out there!

I’m not looking forward 3.24

Posted on by feaneron

Not until it’s fixed.

Those who follow my work are used to read my “Looking forward ” posts, and they appear to be quite popular. This cycle, however, I’m not looking forward the next GNOME release.

That’s because I’m disappointed.

Very disappointed.

😦

#1 – GNOME Shell

UPDATE: I was told this is an Arch-specific issue.

UPDATE 2: This is not an Arch-specific issue. This is now fixed in bug 781194, and will be available in the next GNOME stable release.

Let’s start with GNOME Shell, which is the single topmost important piece of software for end users. I was super excited with the new Night Lights mode, because as you may know, I suffer from insomnia (and fixed many bugs when I couldn’t sleep!).

When it landed on Arch Linux’s gnome-unstable repos, I’m pretty sure I was one of the first ones to test it.

But Shell keeps crashing every ~4 minutes. After 5 or 6 crashes, it logs me out. Needless to say, I lost work multiple times. That’s incredibly annoying.

If anyone is experiencing that, please join us in bug 781194 for we’re trying to find out why those crashes are happening. Fortunately, Philip Chimento is super nice and is working day and night to find out what’s going on.

But that’s still disappointing.

#2 – WebKit2GTK+

UPDATE: This was a regression in WebKit2GTK+.

I try to use Epiphany. I really try. But no matter how much I try, it fails me every time.

Looks like I can’t use keyboard to handle my Google Inbox mails. That’s a show-stopper to me.

#3 – Calendar

UPDATE: Thanks Debarshi for explaining this. He states:

There is a reason why crashes reported by ABRT are marked as ‘private’. Like all backtraces, the ones on those bugs often have passwords and private data in them. I have seen a few over the years. Hence those bugs are only accessible to Fedora contributors by default. Which makes sense, because, as you pointed out, they are Fedora bugs, and users already trust the Fedora community to ship secure software.

Why am I disappointed with my own piece of software? Well, I’m not disappointed with Calendar itself, but with the bugs around it.

It all started with bug 778419.

As you might know, I’m very urgent when it comes to crashes on Calendar. Sometimes I stop urgent tasks to fix crashers as quick as possible. Recently, I received many complaints that Calendar was crashing, but I couldn’t reproduce any one of them and worse, the debug logs weren’t helpful.

Here enters bug 778419.

Appearently, there is a issue management thing called FAF in Fedora. Nice. And looks like it catches many bugs. Super nice! But then, why am I disappointed?

Well, it starts out with me not being a Fedora user, nor watching Red Hat’s bug tracker. GNOME is agnostic to distros, and should stay that way. That’s why we have GNOME Bugzilla instance running, right? So people can report GNOME bugs, in… well, GNOME bug tracker.

But that’s ok – I can eventually see FAF and have some downstream feedback. But here is the catch: appearently, some bugs are private. Isn’t is nice when you can’t see the issues of your own app? Even nicer when appearently downstream doesn’t really care to report those issues upstream. This is clearly stated in the bug.

Let me restate this: GNOME is agnostic to distros. I refuse to watch Red Hat’s bug tracker.

#4 – Software

I was super, super excited to try GNOME Software’s Flatpak integration. I never really used Software since it (i) does not behaves super great in Arch, and (ii) isn’t better than Arch’s pacman.

But I thought Flatpak would change this scenario. Flatpak is not great at command line, building a Flatpak repo is still way too hard for humans, and OSTree’s progress reports don’t really report the progress, but throw random numbers for you to figure out what’s going on. But I was hopeful that all we needed was a good UI for it.

Do I have to say how disappointed I was to see Software falling apart when installing and updating Flatpaks?

I won’t waste any paragraph describing how it fails. You just need to have Software, Flatpak and a repository to see the action.

At Last

Some of you might think this is a rage post. It is not. I use GNOME every day, and I am fixing GNOME every single day of the past 3 or 4 years. I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t love it. It’s indeed the best desktop environment for Linux to me. And I of course will fix every single issue I described here.

But I think we can do better. Much better. Of course, everyone can come here and say “well, you can fix that by yourself until I don’t”, but is that a good approach to this situation? We’re failing in maintaining and improving the platform, and that’s a serious, collective issue. We have unbelievably good hackers around, it’s not the lack of skilled people, nor resources, that is cracking us.

What can we do to improve?

I’ll leave this question broad and open like that, and I’d like to hear the opinions of the community. Let’s just try to keep the level of the respect acceptable.

By the way: Shell crashed 11 times, and I was kicked out of my session twice, until I could finish this article

3.24 Release Party – Back in time

Posted on by feaneron

So, this Saturday 15th, we got together in São Paulo, Brazil, to celebrate another GNOME release. And what a fun time!

We went to a very nice place called “Taverna Medieval” (Medieval Tavern), an almost-real tavern with nice drinks, huge burgers (including the vegan one called “Elven of the Woods”! what a nice burger) and of course a super awsome tavern keeper.

IMG_2319
My juice is no more :/

Of course, we did what normal people does: bow and arrow!

IMG_2337
And I actually shot the middle point!

And the night couldn’t finish without a totally legit sword duel:

IMG_2340
My honor didn’t allow me to finish him

These were some good times!

GNOME Music: the road to 3.24

Posted on by feaneron

(Disclaimer: this is a guest post from Marinus Schraal, the maintainer of Music)

GNOME Music 3.24.1.1 has just been released, a good time to reflect on what has happened last development cycle.

A goal for Music is to make it an exemplary application of GNOME/GTK+ Python programming and make it an entry-level project for new contributors. However the codebase was a mixture of coding styles and oversized multi-functional classes. Python is a powerful and easily accessible language, but the downside is that it can quickly get out of control if not some constraints are set on how to use it. So we started a rework to split up some of the bigger source files and enforce PEP-8 (code-style) & PEP-257 (docstrings) on new commits and bring existing code in line with it. We are not quite there yet on the clean-up front, but we have come a long way and going forward it is gonna get better.

This effort also entailed that we put off some feature additions and mainly worked on core issues, like grouping albums correctly. Album grouping has always been a sore point for Music and is usually mainly visible with for example ‘Greatest Hits’ albums being all presented as one album or with the wrong artist. Over time Music has had a lot of bug reports of this and similar issues. The underlying reason is that Music is purely metadata driven and is actually completely dependant on the data that is provided by Grilo and in turn (for local media) Tracker. If this metadata is incomplete or incorrect then Music cannot correctly display it.

So that is why we worked with the Tracker folks – in particular Garnacho – to get some indexing issues fixed and I think we did come a long way. However, to get the right experience you need to re-index your music files with a recent enough Tracker (at least 1.12) to get the metadata correctly indexed. Music can’t (understandably) force re-indexing and it’s only available via the following command line command.

$ tracker index -m audio/mpeg -m audio/flac -m audio/x-vorbis+ogg -m audio/mp4

It re-indexes the most common audio mime-types. Of course, this is based on the assumption that your music is tagged correctly to begin with. Note that tagging is prone to be taste/ripper/format specific and is often incomplete, we had to make some informed decisions here what we consider ‘correct’.

We also reworked the album art code, which in most places now supports HiDPI art. Because of changes in Tracker security policies we were forced to add some code to do local art retrieval in Music itself. It is ultimately not what we want, but it has to do for now. This also caused some stability issues in the 3.24.0 release, which should hopefully be resolved in the current release.

Part of the clean-up meant we wanted to get rid of libgd as much as possible this cycle as most of it is superseded by regular GTK+ widgets. We made some good progress, replacing (and speeding up) the albums view significantly, reworked the single album view and notifications. Kudos to Feaneron who did some heavy lifting here. There’s still more work left here coming cycle(s).

Despite the focus on making Music future ready code-wise, there were many user-visible improvements all over the place. To list a few:

  • smooth progress bar movement
  • smoother seeking
  • an empty state for the playlist dialog
  • new playlist entry for the playlist dialog
  • a shortcuts window
  • addition of composer information to the album view
  • the ability to search by composer
  • album disc separation
Captura de tela de 2017-04-12 12-27-07
Keyboard Shortcuts for GNOME Music

The most satisfying about this is that most of these contributions were made by a number of different new contributors, so a big thanks to everyone who made Music better this cycle.

Onward to 3.26

The rewrite has brought to the surface some rough edges in Music. There are some things that used to work and might not at this point, maybe because they were held together with band-aids and actually need more work to get right. There are things we want (remote sources/live updating/proper indication of played tracks/etcetera), but we can’t do yet. The core infrastructure is lacking.

The one big thing we want this cycle -besides finishing what we started last cycle- is doing the rework Feaneron blogged about earlier: having a single core model that drives the different views. This would solve a plethora of currently hard to tackle issues, some of which I just mentioned. From there we would be able to land bigger new features, like the GSoC work done on tagging & webdav sources. The Core Apps hackfest was a big part of crystallizing what needs to be done here.

Of course we cannot do this without help and we hope to see you soon on IRC (#gnome-music), on Bugzilla or check the Wiki for more info.

A final note on Tracker

In the past we used to ask people to hard reset their Tracker database if something went wrong or seemed out of whack, meaning it would be fully cleared and rebuilt. A lot of effort has gone into Tracker to make it more robust and stable. At this point we strongly suggest to not do a hard reset lightly; Music is using the tracker database for keeping track of things like playlists, favourites and played count. This might extend even further in the future.

If you have a problem with Tracker, don’t wipe it and the exclusive data that might live in it’s database: file a bug, seek help on IRC (#tracker) and we can work from there.

3.24 Release Party in São Paulo

Posted on by feaneron

(English version after the Portuguese one)

Fala galera!

Nesse sábado, dia 15 / abril, teremos uma festinha de lançamento do GNOME 3.24! Sei que está um pouco atrasado, mas é melhor ter uma festa do que nenhuma 🙂

O local: Taverna Medieval, na Vila Mariana. Além de ser um lugar muito divertido (poucos lugares tem hamburgeres chamados e.g. Elfo da Floresta, ou Skyrim) , lá tem opções vegetarianas e veganas – ninguém fica de fora da celebração!

Se você quiser participar: comente aqui e me mande um email (georges.stavracas at gmail.com) com seu nome, para que possamos reservar a mesa com antecedência. Teremos um limite de até 20 pessoas, dado que o lugar não é muito grande.

Se você não puder participar, mas conhecer alguém que possa se interessar, compartilhe a informação 🙂

Este evento também está marcado no Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/pt-BR/GNOME-Hacking-em-Sao-Paulo/

(English version)

Greetings, people!

This Saturday, April 15th, we’re having a GNOME 3.24 Release Party in São Paulo! I know, I know, we’re late, but better late then never 🙂

The place: Medieval Tavern, at Vila Mariana. Not only it’s very funny and cool (few places have burgers called e.g. Elf of the Woods, or Skyrim in Brazil) but it also has strict and ovolacto vegetarian options – nobody will miss the celebration!

If you’re attending: drop a comment here and send me an email (georges.stavracas at gmail.com) with your name, so we can book a table in advance. There is a 20-person limit, since the place isn’t that big.

If you can’t attend, but know someone who might be interested in, share the news 🙂

This event is also available in Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/pt-BR/GNOME-Hacking-em-Sao-Paulo/

How I became a GNOME contributor

Posted on by feaneron

Recently, I was asked by my fellow GNOME friends to write how did I transitioned from nothing to a GNOME contributor. The intention is to motivate people to engage. I don’t think my story is that exciting, but, well, why not? If someone gets motivated and start contributing, goal achieved. But beware: there ain’t any TL;DR here. it’s just a long story.

So, where should I start?

From Childhood to Early Contributions

My relationship with computers began at early age, since I was literate by my parents using an old computer we gained from a relative. I remember searching “how to create exe files” around 2004, and that search result yelled me a Yahoo! Answers question with “you need to learn a programming language. Start with C”.

And so I did.

My first app was a command line calculator. Moving to Linux was a natural step. And that introduced me to GNOME, and Gtk+. By that time, Gtk+ was still 2.6. I did some small apps for personal use, like an app to track new habits. Unfortunately, those apps are long gone.

And that’s how it all started.

Translations…

Fast forward some years and, one day, while using a GNOME app (can’t remember which one!), I saw an unstranslated string! I researched a bit and found out that I could translate and contribute to the Brazilian Portuguese translation team. This was 2012, GNOME 3 was just released, everybody were still very angry, things were very confusing.

My first upstream contributions back to the end of 2012, fixing and adding some missing translations.

At that time, there was one project that draw my attention: a new, unreleased app called GNOME Calendar. It was under heavy development in a branch called ui-review, no packages were available… and yet, I simply loved it. The developer, Erick Perez, is highly skilled. This app was a hidden gem.

Unfortunately, development of Calendar stalled and I spent more than 1 year checking the logs almost every day, waiting for changes.

They never came.

… and GNOME Calendar

“This project was too good to die”, I thought. “I have to do somthing.” First, I tried to finish the design specs of Calendar. You can still find it in my DeviantArt page (click here to check it out).

Then I ran Gedit, opened some files and started hacking Calendar. My very first work was on the Week view prototype we had in there. The video of this new feature is still available:

Notice that the second article of this blog talks about that 🙂

Erick saw that, sent me an email, I attached some patches to Bugzilla, and this is how I officially started contributing to GNOME. At the same year, GNOME Calendar had its first release ever – and this makes the third article of this blog.

GNOME Foundation and Google Summer of Code

After increasing my contribution rate at GNOME Calendar, Erick suggested me to get a Foundation membership. In Januray 2015, I applied and was accepted (yay!!). At the same year, I decided to apply for a Google Summer of Code project at Nautilus. The mentor was Carlos Soriano.

The GSoC project was very successfull, and not only Nautilus received the improvements, but also Gtk+ itself. This is when the “Other Locations” view was introduced, and a big code refactor landed (and allowed Nautilus to improve much more!)

Captura de tela de 2015-12-11 02-45-11
The results of that Summer of Code project

Fun fact: while organizing the tasks of the GSoC, I couldn’t find any personal task manager for GNOME that satisfied me. I took one week and create GNOME To Do to organize my tasks.

With that done, the only step left was presenting that work at GUADEC.

GUADEC and Endless

The presentation at GUADEC was good enough, and meeting the people behind GNOME was one of the most remarkable experiences in my life. At that GUADEC, I met Cosimo, who works at Endless. I remember he downloading the new Gtk+ version and saying “look at this cute ‘Other Locations’ button!” (!!!) 🙂

A few weeks after that, I was contacted by Endless, where I am up to this day. Here at Endless, I’m lucky enough to be able to work upstream almost by default. I’m also happy to be able to make GNOME (through Endless OS) reach more people around the world.

What’s next?

New Control Center, more features in Calendar and To Do, and some other surprises I’ll write about in the future 🙂

The new Online Accounts & Printer panels (and other related news!)

Posted on by feaneron

Greetings, GNOMErs!

If you’re watching closely the GNOME Control Center iterations, you probably noticed it already has a bunch of new panels: Keyboard, Mouse & Touchpad, and other panels like Sharing, Privacy and Search that don’t need to be ported.

I’m pleased to announce that the Online Accounts panel joined this family.

Check this out:

Captura de tela de 2017-02-23 10-27-19.png
The new Online Accounts panel

This panel was easier to be ported since the codebase was already somewhat recent. It now features a single-column layout, which fits perfectly the next shell of GNOME Control Center.

Editing and creating accounts are now handled in a separate dialog:

captura-de-tela-de-2017-02-23-10-27-43
Editing an account
captura-de-tela-de-2017-02-23-10-27-51
Adding a new online account

But that’s not all!

The new Printers panel

Thanks to the always awsome Felipe Borges, we have a brand new, super shiny Printers panel. Most importantly, it has colored ink indicators! Dude, what else could you ask for?

I’ll let Felipe himself write this one in details, but why not tease the audience? 🙂

Captura de tela de 2017-02-23 10-45-52.png
Super beautiful Printers panel (uh… no printers here)

Lets shout a big thanks to this great GNOME contributor!

m(_ _)m

What’s left?

In order to permanently switch to the new shell (the one in the screenshots), there are three major panels to be reworked:

  • Sounds: required to switch to the new shell, the Sounds panel will probably be very time consuming.
  • Networks: another required and hard panel. This panel will be split into Wi-Fi, Mobile Broadband, and Networks, and it’ll probably require a lot of work too.
  • Details: each tab in the Details panel will be split into a separate panel. It’ll be mostly manual work, and it’s easy (anyone interested in picking this one up? 🙂 )

This work can be tracked here. Excited? Join us in creating the next generation Settings application – contributions are so appreciated!

Meet the new Week view

Posted on by feaneron

This morning, I had some free hours to spend on my baby Calendar, and of course I’d spend on what matters the most: the Week view.

I’ve been working on and off in this feature for quite a while, and the last missing piece was proper drag n’ drop support. Fear no more!, and say hello to the new Week view in GNOME Calendar:

captura-de-tela-de-2017-01-17-19-43-40
Introducing the Week view

This work initially started as a Summer of Code driven by Vamsi, and I just went ahead and finished his work. I tried to be as careful as possible with the new Week view, in order to keep in on part with Month and Year views. That means:

  • Drag n’ drop
  • Visualizing and editing events
  • Properly handle multiday and all day events
  • Being beautiful
  • Handling too many events

And so it goes. You can create all day and multiday events very quickly:

captura-de-tela-de-2017-01-17-19-58-38
Creating all day, multiday events by clicking the header

Of course you can also create timed events with the new week view! Check this out:

captura-de-tela-de-2017-01-17-20-00-17
Creating a timed event in the week view’s grid

And, as always, the traditional sequence of pictures with an awsome rock-ish soundtrack!

 

Excited? Join #gnome-calendar IRC room at irc.gnome.org, or send me an email to get in touch! Don’t be shy. Calendar is entirely made by amazing contributors dedicating their free time to make the world a slightly better place to live 🙂

Enjoy!

A history about Gtk+, Vulkan and Wayland

Posted on by feaneron

A few weeks ago, I was curious to test Gtk+ 4. I know it has some awsome features like OpenGL rendering, major cleanups and other hot stuff, but didn’t have the chance to check it out until then.

I was mostly excited about Vulkan.

I know both of my laptop’s graphic cards support Vulkan. It’s a hybrid Intel Broadwell G2 + NVidia GeForce 920M, although I don’t use the latter because Linux sucks hard with Dual GPU.

Downloaded the latest Gtk+ source, compiled and… nothing. Immediate segmentation fault. Yay! What a great chance to get involved with the next major Gtk+ version development!

So, this happened:

captura-de-tela-de-2017-01-17-09-24-32
The Fishbowl running under Wayland and rendered with Vulkan

May not be as exciting, since there are no new visible features but… damn, it’s Gtk+ being rendered with Vulkan on Wayland. It’s basically the state-of-the-art of toolkit support right now. Even better, the absolute majority of applications will gain this for free once they port to Gtk+ 4 series.

Getting this into an usable state wasn’t easy, but fortunately, Vulkan has an ~amazing~ thing called “Validation Layers” that simplified the tedious debugging process a whole lot (of course, only after making the validation layers work with Gtk+). This work even uncovered a driver bug in the Intel driver, which was quickly fixed by Lionel Landwerlin and Jason Ekstrand (thanks folks!)

Of course, there are many improvements that still must be done. A bright future is lying ahead!