Gnome Receives €1M from German Government
omgubuntu.co.uk
omgubuntu.co.uk
Linux already has a good foundation. BRLTTY works with just about any Braille display, cups can print both text, and even images, to Braille printers, and Emacspeak has existed since the late 90's. Even on Windows, the best and most useful addons for a screen reader are on NVDA, the open source one. Imagine what we can do when we control the whole stack? A true audio desktop, with audible animations. No need to spend $1099 for the most high quality screen reader and OS. being able to put Linux on the [Optima laptop](https://www.orbitresearch.com/product/optima/) upcoming laptop, and have everything open, from the metal to the GUI. Just a dream of mine, and I'm not a developer so can't do much to bring it to life, but it definitely would be nice, and the desktop environment is about the biggest thing that can be made better in order to fulfil this. I'm telling y'all, we're ready for something better than Windows and Mac. Note that I'm just one person, and don't speak for every blind person and definitely don't speak for every disabled person. There are blind people and especially partially sighted people that love Windows and Apple and Android.
https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-...
Funding and advocacy is just as important as developer time :)
I'm also proud of my government for doing this - It's probably one of the coolest projects they do and some of the best allocated spending.
Just think what all this high-quality software would cost us as a society if it was sold or rented to us.
We recently won funding as well (much smaller scale) https://stackable.tech/en/empowering-rust-projects/
This is definitely government spending I can get behind.
"Encrypt user home directories individually"
What does this have to do with Gnome, a desktop environment?
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservi... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4644
It's also much easier to disable/enable encrypted home directories post-partition.
Edit: found the discussion I think I saw https://discourse.gnome.org/t/nautilus-as-file-picker/11605
(The Sovereign Tech Fund is different beast it seems because it is actually the German state behind)
So most of those non profits look the same, are all lead by some professional–managerial class newcomer who have no real link to computer science. They are not really here to inspire people or recruit contributors, they are people in charge of keeping the money flowing, governance, compliance, etc.
My guess is this new architecture of the open source software ecosystem is an elegant way for tech (IBM, Google, etc.) to keep funding & control over key projects they rely on. While fiscally optimizing the whole thing & getting public money from the EU and others.
This is just my intuition, if someone could confirm...
What am I complaining about?
Those are not free, grassroot projects & organisations anymore. The day you will desperately need free software because the Orwellian architecture of the EU chatcontrol and cyber resilience act will be operational those non profits will most probably take the knee and comply.
Maybe the EU will eventually sell us out in the name of saving-the-children, but at least they don't have selling us out as their raison d'être.
It's true this is no longer the small hobbyist/tinker dream of the free software activists, but is that vision even possible in today's world? If you want to offer regular users the choice of libre software in near-parity with commercial offerings, you need a lot of money, a lot of developers, and big organizations. As far as I can see, that's just an objective truth.
How is this an objective truth?
Also why is it that what was possible yesterday is not possible today?
The GNU project was started in the early 80s when even in the western world only a very small minority had access to a computer.
Since then we put computers in the hand of almost everyone but now we can't write serious free software without a big corporation/government & money?
This is what happened in the early 00s, corporations like IBM understood they wouldn't be able to compete with free software now that we have the internet & everyone will have access to computers. So they captured the open source projects & even Microsoft understood 15 years later that they had to do it too. And now they have been successful in convincing you that no serious software can written without them and you consider that an "objective truth".
And on top of that the EU & others are telling you can't have serious & safe software without complying to their regulations...
Just look at the BSDs, they have been able to keep up with Linux (I mean they are in the same ballpark in term of security, features & performance) with a fraction of the money.
There is a path-dependence in software and it's almost inconceivable that a small team of hobbyists starting from scratch could build, for example, an office suite that could compete with MS Office or Google Docs. For better or worse, we're stuck with Libre Office.
Even Microsoft, with their massive resources, decided they weren't up to building and maintaining their own browser engine. They've chained themselves to Google's Blink along with everyone else.
BSD is an interesting example: less hardware support, fewer GUI options, good luck running BSD on a mobile phone. Can you imagine your parents trying to use BSD as their primary OS?
As far as I understand, GNOME being funded is all about doing a good job at applying for a grant with the Sovereign Tech Fund.
That said, unfortunately, I echo the statements from others: I think they really ought to have picked KDE. I think KDE better embodies the spirit of the Linux desktop and open source, even for all of its flaws, of which there are many. I'm sure GNOME has a lot of avid fans and users, and having used Phosh I'm legitimately impressed at how good GTK4 and libadw have gotten for mobile. That said, I still feel like it makes a pretty bad productivity desktop, and there's a reason why every alternative GNOME or GTK-based desktop from System76 Cosmic to Budgie to XFCE is either ditching or ignoring Mutter: GNOME's fumbling of the Wayland bag has been painful for the whole ecosystem. I hate to complain about anything that is literally free, but it has become a genuine depressing drain. We could've just had pragmatic SSD support in Mutter, but instead all we have is libdecor, an option that is not ideal (especially for apps not written in C) and seems like it's perpetually not ready. Sometimes it feels like your actual best option for getting window borders in GNOME might be sub-surfacing yourself into a GTK4 window.
And it's even more frustrating, because some of the developers are great. I am a huge fan of libinput in general. I was looking forward, then, to checking out libei, a library (in theory) that lets you emulate input, e.g. to inject events. A library like libei could be great, because there's already a lot of Wayland compositors (most Wayland compositors) that support input injection today, so making it into a C library seems smart. Unfortunately, libei doesn't support them. Apparently, it is not "waylandy" (??????) to put input injection protocols in Wayland, and libei is only designed to support its own homegrown RPC solution which is a slightly modified version of the Wayland protocol instead. The way libei is supposed to work is that you use it, and it connects over a socket to the eis server, which speaks the ei protocol. How do you know which eis server to connect to? From the libei side, there's no prescription here. But it's OK. Mutter doesn't expose an eis server directly. Apparently, you need to go through XDG Desktop Portals to use libei on Mutter. Because this is insanely convoluted, the foresight was had to develop liboeffis, a library that does XDG Desktop Portal interactions for you so you can get a socket to the eis server without having to care about all of that dbus crap. I tried compiling a version of GNOME that had eis support (at the time NixOS didn't have GNOME 45+, I don't know if it currently does) and I was either unsuccessful at that, or unsuccessful at getting libei to work. No matter how hard I tried, nothing really seemed to work right.
Meanwhile, on wlroots compositors, you can just use the Wayland socket itself:
https://wayland.app/protocols/virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1
https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-virtual-pointer-unstable-v...
This, of course, makes a lot of sense when you consider that the input events you're injecting will... you know... go over the Wayland socket. It's a perfect way to speak to the correct compositor, since I already am speaking to the correct compositor. Why introduce another socket?
Meanwhile, while lacking this rather basic feature, libei allows for backends that do things like use uinput, which to me makes no sense. The big difference between libei and something like uinput is that I'm injecting events on the compositor side. It's like the difference between telling the compositor to move the mouse to 4, 4 and generating USB HID motion events to do the same. Almost every other platform has a serviceable API here, and it's useful for accessibility, automation and testing, and probably more. Unfortunately the story today with Wayland is pretty mediocre and even more unfortunately the direction it seems to be going doesn't look like it will improve unless you're willing to only support wlroots.
This sucks because I want to work on cool Linux desktop software, but in practice I'm so bummed out by the time I scale through the mess of a stack that has developed in the desktop side that I basically lose interest. And to be clear, I'm not saying the wlroots ecosystem is perfect. Like I don't think there's a good way to make a virtual graphics tablet device yet in wlroots, which would be quite useful for a project that I wanted to work on (trying to get support for Windows WMPOINTER_* events in Wine; making Winetests for this would probably ideally involve virtual input, but lacking even basic support for what XTEST does, it's hard to imagine making these tests work in Wine any time soon, and compositor-specific protocols are a no-go afaik.)
It'd be nice to have something like autohotkey for Linux, too. But I think by the time a developer has gone through the realizations that I have, they are probably too drained to even think about working on it.
(Despite all of this, I really am still glad for it, and I believe some day all of this crap will get sorted out. I guess a part of me types out these huge rants just to vent, but another part of me hopes someone who has influence to fix things will read them and realize the situation sucks. Wishful thinking.)
Isn't this what libdecor does?
Interfacing with the system toolkit is how you get window decorations on both macOS and Windows, so it's not as if that's not a already widely used idea.
This may be my least favorite part of the current wayland architecture. I really wish potentially high frequency input events depending on user action wouldn't be mixed up with the regular wayland events. I think it should be up to the consumer to choose how often to wake up and see if the user has done anything it cares about. Forcing the wayland socket to be activated every $MOUSE_POLLRATE is just a big waste, and it also leaves a risk if the consumer isn't fast enough for some reason because when the socket buffer it full it will be closed and the app likely crash. A better solution would have been a ringbuffer of set size, potentially with a consumer set policy of how to handle overflow.
This is a lesson the telecom industry have learned a long time ago - don't mix signaling and bulk traffic.
I don't think any compositor does this, but at least in theory it seems like you could do this using Wayland too, by just silently coalescing events when the client is behind on reading them. There's already a frame ID for input events, so in theory adding a protocol to go back and grab coalesced events using the frame ID seems like something you could do. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already some kind of solution like this somewhere, but at least it doesn't seem too hard to do if not.
The one thing I will say is that Windows also had the concept of events having priority in addition.
I have built this already: https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11
The X11 variant was fine, but Wayland support is indeed too messy, so the experimental build for that just uses uinput/evdev and ignores anything Wayland-related. I don't think there is a feasible alternative right now for tools like this, and it sucks. At this point I'm honestly mostly hoping for at-spi to rescue us. https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11/issues/2
1. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2023-Ma...
It also doesn't help with window management: "One example is xdotool which does window focus and modifier mangling (see below). Window focus notification is not available to a pure libei client and would have to be obtained or handled on a separate channel, e.g. X or Wayland. Having said that, a Wayland client does not usually have acess to query or modifiy the window focus."
Edit: libei supports a "receiver" mode too. Perhaps it'll be useful after all!
> The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is composed entirely of free software. It was founded on 5 March 2001 by Compaq, Eazel, Helix Code, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and VA Linux Systems.
Also here is Red Had boasting about how much they pay for Gnome https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/gnome-desktop...
Ok, I'll say it. Thank you, German Government -- open-source needs funding, and organisations like yours helps to keep things going, making sure we get cool new features :)
really? Executives are quite important in making sure the organization they're in charge of is well run, efficient and reaches the stated goals.
Paying a low salary to an executive for a non-profit will merely make the non-profit less efficient at achieving their goals. Just because it's a non-profit, doesn't mean the workers in the organization should be self-sacrificing their own salary (by accepting a lower-than-market rate).
Now, there's a point to be made where if an executive's achievements or effectiveness at directing the organization is poor, they need to be booted, or at least have performance incentives etc.
As for the grant being tax-payer funded, i don't see why it is any worse a form of spending than welfare.
So 100k salaries are totally a thing in Germany for white collar employees.
On the "life changing" aspect, consider this thread is about German market and therefore cost of living. Given that, I'm confident to say 100k is not life changing. Comfortable salary range? yes absolutely, but not something you can just get this amount once and be sorted for life.
The context here is completely different though, we are talking about specialized white collar jobs in the German/european market.
Certainly not a reason to criticize the German government for this great initiative.
It also set a good example for startup folks that use a lot of open source and in most cases give nothing back.
For an executive this is a low salery, even in Germany.
Sorry, but simply not true. You might want to look into statistics and not extrapolate from your vicinity.
https://www.glassdoor.de/Geh%C3%A4lter/prokurist-gehalt-SRCH...
And we are including müllers it services here
Here is the Glassdoor page for "software manager" in Germany:
https://www.glassdoor.de/Gehälter/software-manager-gehalt-SR...
As you can easily see, the job pays up to 150k, with 100k on average.
Where is the truth?
If a non-profit hires a janitor, should they pay the janitor less?
As someone who runs a tiny hyper-local non profit (we take in a few thousand $s a year), running a non profit requires as much, if not more, work than running a for profit business.
One reason why we have such awful non profits is that they don’t pay enough to compete for the best talent.
Of course the org can make money and keep it for later.
Being the trust-fund offspring of a deity, he had it made from birth. But that's not how the story goes.
It shows humility and puts you on the same level of vulnerability as others. It's what separates you from the gentry. You give everything of yourself to help others, to prove you're one of them, and inspire others to help in kind.
Which land and business domain is that?
You need to work on your negotiating skills
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/43572...
(Yes, I too was surprised to learn that Gnome is now run by a self-described Shaman with no engineering experience)
Then you haven't been paying attention for what your GEZ fees are being spent on.
I can't speak specifically for Germany, but in the UK Germany has a reputation for paying better, and €100k would be pretty par-for-the-course for a senior developer, and stingy for a staff/principal engineer.
Let's assume KDE and Gnome are equally good in every single aspect. In this case, don't you think it's a little bit weird that German government chooses Gnome over KDE, whose origin in Germany? It's not charity, but taxpayers' money.
>I find it [...] surprising that the top comment [...] is criticising the effort
Nothing about it being immune to criticism, just surprised that the dominant post (as the time) was critical. The puzzle of successfully funding open source is ever present. A government has made a meaningful investment in an open source project. It might not be your favourite project, and it doubtless has challenges. But I'm with GP in seeing this as net good news.
Yeah, the criticism of the effort absolutely seems misplaced.
Even the criticism of the money going to Gnome seems misplaced unless someone has gone through the criteria and identified which criteria they find unhelpful, or goes through Gnome’s application and identifies where they’ve misidentified.
Otherwise a criticism of the effort sounds simply like someone who has done no work at all, looks at an effort that has clearly put in a lot of process and safeguards (as evident simply from the application submitted), didn’t like the result but out of sheer laziness don’t even try to identify what went wrong and decided to piss all over the people who are actually putting in money, time, resources and effort to do something.
Unfortunately this is quite common in the open source world. People who don’t actually do any of the work (which includes me, even if I’ve submitted a few PRs) that go around telling the people doing the actual work that they’re doing it wrong without putting in the effort to show how or why they’re doing it wrong.
Not at all. GNOME filled up an application for Sovereign Tech Fund and received the grant for stated purposes. In order for KDE to receive it too, someone from the project would have to apply first and their request would have to be evaluated positively too.
I am not quite sure how kalendar, korganizer and kontact fit together.
Looking at the list on https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/ my highlights are:
Improving the security of the Python and JavaScript ecosystem, this was very much needed, curl, wireguard, and OpenSSH.
That might be part of the point of the money.
Also, gnome isn't going anywhere, it's been around for decades, and we watched Ubuntu the most popular distro by google trends move away from gnome only to go back to gnome a while later
I'm still convinced every desktop environment should be a physics simulator - 2D or 3D. If you want consistent animations, changes of state, etc. you don't hardcode these into your application. Your application should exist in a physics simulator. Your windows are objects with layers. You're looking at a composited view of them. In 2023 we have the hardware and the know-how to run physics simulators as your desktop environments.
</tinfoil-hat>
Also, as you can see on my comments history, most of my GNU/Linux use is on VMs and servers, since VMWare got good enough I have stopped the dual boot dance.
While I half agree with you that there may be better sources for this funding, I'm happy for any serious open source funding, and the (hopefully positive!) attention it receives from that
(And this comes from a long-term i3 user who loathes using heavy DEs :P)
We can pretty reliable say that Gnome will be around for a long time.
I am aware of a few German cities having a custom SuSE version with KDE on their libraries, for the employees and terminals available to the public.
I'm not a Gnome user these days, but where I can, I donate to the projects I use.
This attitude from German government is great and sets a great example for us all.
(though I quite enjoy kde myself)
Unless it is The GIMP. That seems to get people going every once in a while.
It pains me to see them throwing money at the wall instead of creating dedicated jobs, paying (German) engineers to fix bugs and develop long needed features. Given how low German wages are, they could pay around 10 engineers for a full year with that money.
Steam runs on KDE on SteamOS
I'm not entirely convinced that using SteamOS can really be counted as "using KDE" in any way.
Well, I wouldn't make that statement so strong. KDE Plasma is the default desktop environment on SteamOS, it's just that it doesn't boot into its desktop environment by default (but you're two buttons away from switching into it).
Game mode is a wayland session with gamescope as a WM, but it isn't controlled directly by the user. The steam client controls the WM and exposes those controls to you through menus and handles stuff like notifications and being a driver for the controller, so you could call it a DE in game mode.
More like X session running under XWayland. gamescope doesn't really expose Wayland interfaces to clients (well, technically it does expose some stuff, but I wouldn't qualify that as anything else than implementation detail - although that may have started to change recently, I've seen some stuff being done around xdg-shell there).
I'm partial to KDE myself, but honestly anything with a sensible panel is usable.
I’m the same! I’ve never understood how people have such strong emotions when it comes to a desktop environment. They all (including Windows, macOS, and even iPadOS) feel like they are good enough to me and I enjoy switching to something different once in a while.
Yes. It'samazing how much better Linux runs when the hardware vendor actually supports Linux.
It also helps that the Steam Deck has a narrower Mission than a desktop computer.
The only thing that is annoying in macOS is the lack of good tiling, but there are good third party options that add tiling.
I've been using Linux as my primary desktop environment for 19 years. It's unbelievable how little I know about Linux these days. Things just work!
It'd be low for a senior dev: https://www.stepstone.de/gehalt/Senior-Software-Entwickler-i...
Unless you're talking about net income, then it is truly god-tier...
Fwiw Wayland is a bit of a disaster, see: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...
There was an HN thread on this, but it was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210694
Reddit, Phoronix, the entire internet has people complaining about Wayland. It's really not hard to find them.
It's just an app that describes itself as being ”for GNOME”.
I don't think it's fair to judge GNOME's quality based on 1 app that targets the platform.
Neither does KDE Ark on Wayland. Tested yesterday.
2. UI\UX is lacking. Too many controls all over the place or at least too sticking out.
PS: "all over the place" is just the best phrase I can thing of in english to describe KDE. But most of all this is just about two different views on how a DE should look and feel like.
KDE fans prefer this "I have all the inputs in one place even if I use 80% of them once a year" and "I can configure every pixel even though I won't do it ever".
Gnome fans prefer "clean and simple (and opinionated)" and "this DE gives me 80% of what I can possibly want for 20% of effort".
You contrast this to Gnome, where there are NOT comparable configuration options, and you are 'happy with minor issues'.
I don't see how this is materially different from simply choosing to not use the extensive KDE configuration capabilities and being as 'happy with minor issues' as you would be with Gnome.
>AND that you feel you must use them.
I'm misunderstood here then. I'm not saying that a feel I must use them. I'm saying the KDE UI by default exposes too many controls and provides settings to control this (more or less).
While Gnome exposes less controls (and arguable better UI desicions). Resulting in cleaner UI by default.
See this comment by the other user who shares my views: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38230429
I've never really understood the complaint 'there's too many configuration options', at least in software where you don't need to touch any of those configuration options for a reasonable out-of-the-box experience.
If your problem with KDE is, in fact, that a vanilla stock install doesn't align with your personal UI preferences, while also bemoaning that there's too many ways to adjust the UI, then the problem might not be with KDE.
To each their own. Like I said.
That's very subjective. I used Windows, Mac OS, Android (various UIs), KDE etc.. It's not "modern" semi transparent themes and gradients and rounded everything and whitespace, it is very responsive and works like I expect.
My whole comment is a private opinion.
The difference is that KDE prefers doing this incrementally, which takes longer especially outside of core apps like Konsole and Dolphin, but it also prevents clusterfucks like the gnome-terminal vs gnome-console situation, and reduces churn in general.
Or, more likely, will configure many of them once and then be happy, as opposed to GNOME where if you're unhappy with anything you're just out of luck.
The whole point of my comment is that people are different. I'd rather not spend my time configuring KDE as I did 15 years ago and be happy with minor issues of GNOME.
I wish I could configure KDE "declaratively" with a configuration file, like what I do with i3.
Nah it's the most capable desktop on Linux these days.
It's good that there are 2 distinct, competitive desktop environments, that each suit different people well.
Yes, I know there are other ways to do this (e.g. screen), but they require planning in advance and I don't always know when I want to do that. There have been other things that I used that have also been removed over the time that I used Gnome.
I appreciate Gnome for the smooth experience they provide but have switched to KDE which better meets my needs and wants.
People don’t make much art in MS Paint, or code in Notepad, despite those being the default for most computer users.
I think GNOME is very explicit in pushing you towards using independent applications that best fit your needs, while also providing simple to use, but not very feature-rich, defaults. I appreciate that approach.
That was my point: I understand who power users of terminals are; I understand who power users of graphics software are; I understand who power users of CAD are. But a DE is a glorified application launcher; there really isn’t much there of which to be a power user.
This is very Windows-specific problem. macOS, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, KDE nowadays all include decent sets of apps, thankfully. I will not miss the days of installing PDF readers (half of them full of ads), ZIP decompressors, image viewers (IfranView), MP3 players, etc.
Sadly, last time I was daily-driving GNOME (~2 years ago), this was exactly my experience - Evince was extremely laggy on big PDFs compared to Okular, Eye of Gnome had little functionality compared to Gwenview, File Roller lacked drag-and-drop and some formats that Ark supported, Gnome Terminal lacked many keyboard shortcuts that Konsole had, Gnome Software looked like just a proof-of-concept, etc.
> I think GNOME is very explicit in pushing you towards using independent applications
I wasn't aware this is the case, but I could accept this philosophy and be happy... if the distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) shared this opinion and thus made their default flavor have GNOME WM with e.g. KDE apps. Sadly this is not the case, so I've started recommending my non-tech-savvy friends (that became curious to try out Linux since Windows got so bad) to go for full KDE experience.
My examples of a drawing app and a text editor stand, I think.
> if the distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) shared this opinion and thus made their default flavor have GNOME WM with e.g. KDE apps
A distribution, typically, does not have a better way to guess your preferences than a DE does. Pushing overloaded applications on everyone is not a solution.
> I've started recommending my non-tech-savvy friends (that became curious to try out Linux since Windows got so bad) to go for full KDE experience
Do you support them afterwards?
No, they don't. Most of the time updating an extension for a new gnome version is simply a matter of adding a number in the manifest file, but even when it isn't, they all get updated very quickly. Gnome 45 changed some core APIs so basically every extension had to be updated, and yet from ~10 extensions I use only 1 was not supported immediately upon GNOME 45 release, and even it got updated less than a week later.
I still haven't used anything more 'just works' and 'capable' than xfce, what has KDE added in the past decade or so since I used it that made it 'most capable'?
That is not the point.
Most big open source projects end up with an entire commercial ecosystem backing them. KDE has probably directly created many more jobs in Europe/Germany than GNOME. Such things should be taken into consideration when determining who deserves grants paid by EU/German tax payers.
KDE e.V. is based in Berlin, Germany
Both have corporate and individiaul contributors from around the wold but these are not indentically distributed with Gnome being more popular in the US compared to the EU. Calling these two desktop environments "American" and "European" is of course not painting the full picture but it isn't entirely wrong either.
KDE always offered more options and configuration and was never as dumbed down as Gnome. But obviously most users do not need that that is why they like Gnome better. KDE has cool things like KDE Connect that was ported to Gnome later. When I used stable versions it was always perfectly fine to use. Not at all a Clusterfuck. 2nd most popular DE for a reason.