GUADEC 2024

19 Jul 2024, 02:00 → 24 Jul 2024, 16:00 America/Denver

Kristi Progri

Welcome to GUADEC 2024

GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.

 

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About GNOME

GNOME is a free and open-source software environment project supported by a non-profit foundation. Together, the community of contributors and the Foundation create a computing platform and software ecosystem, composed entirely of free software, that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.

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Friday, 19 July

1 Welcome and Opening Remarks

10:10 Break

2 CHAOSS and GNOME - leveraging the power of community driven metrics

Never has there a better time to start looking at better metrics especially at a time when we are looking to compete with other projects for the hearts and minds of the community. This talk by Georg Link and Sriram Ramkrishna will talk about the work of the App Ecosystem Working Group at CHAOSS - a community driven metrics organization and how we can leverage their work to build a better sustainable ecosystem.

Speakers: Georg Link (CHAOSS Community), Sriram Ramkrishna

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3 DEI workshops & activities

Join in for diverse mini-sessions and engaging activities throughout the workshop. Dive into Ally Skills and Impostor Syndrome workshops, along with icebreaker games and social activities. We will break into smaller groups to participate in hands-on experiences such as card games and sticky notes. Bring your enthusiasm and energy – and prepare for a dynamic DEI workshop at GUADEC.

Speaker: Jona Azizaj

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4 The Newest JavaScript Technologies in GNOME

This talk is about GNOME's JavaScript platform. We'll talk about the latest developments in using TypeScript to write GNOME apps, new JavaScript language and GNOME platform features that you can use in your code, gjs.guide and community-led documentation updates, the power at your fingertips with a code sandbox like Workbench, and celebrate some of the past year's contributions. If you write GNOME apps or Shell extensions in JavaScript or TypeScript, don't miss it!

Speakers: Andy Holmes, Evan Welsh, Philip Chimento

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10:55 Coffee Break

5 GTK's new renderers - a deep dive

The GTK core team has been working on new GSK renderers for about a year before merging them at the beginning of this year. In this talk we'll present various angles of this effort, and go into some depth to present the technical underpinnings and tradeoffs of GTK's rendering infrastructure.

The presentation should be of particular interest to both app developers who want to get the most out of GTK's rendering capabilities and to prospective GTK contributors. Our goal is to make it enjoyable for anybody with a passing interest in rendering and graphics.

Speakers: Benjamin Otte, Matthias Clasen

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6 I control my own data! ...So, what exactly can I do with it?

Data sovereignty is often touted as a key principle for ensuring user privacy in the age of always-connected Internet services: the ability to archive and export your information ensures that you cannot be held captive by a provider that falls short on ethics or security. The tricky bit comes when users attempt to unpack their data and put it to use. This talk examines the tools available to access common exported data sets with free software, with an emphasis on how the desktop Linux experience could provide a better and more integrated experience. Datasets examined include email, messaging, media, bookmarks and favorites from discussion forums, geolocation history, health records, contacts and calendars, and social media posts.

Speaker: Nathan Willis

11:50 Break

7 Developing WebKitGTK Made Easy - wkdev-sdk

A new SDK has been created to improve the developer experience working on WebKitGTK. This talk is aimed at current and potential contributors covering the problems it solves and the workflow of using the SDK.

Speaker: Patrick Griffis (Igalia)

8 Integrating the FOSS Community in Latam to Projects and Strategies of Gnome Foundation

FOSS communities in Latam are taking an important role as drivers towards the use, adoption, development and contribution to technological solutions such as Linux, Gnome, LibreOffice, OpenStreetMaps, KDE and many more.

It is important to prioritize both the development of new technological innovation projects under a philosophy of open collaboration and to strengthen by contributing to the many that are being executed with a high scale of usability.

As part of the Model, the proposal is to take advantage of activities such as the following:

• Structure an agenda of Meetups among the community.

• Identify some Gnome projects that can be strengthened by the talent of our community in Latam.

• Consolidate specialized development teams around Gnome solutions.

• Maintain the effort of the Gnome Latam Local Team.

• The above allows the maturity of contributors and developers in FOSS projects and especially around Gnome projects.

Speaker: Manuel Haro (Chief at Open Source Innovation Labs Community and DEDICA Foundation)

12:20 Break

9 Gameeky: A new learning tool built on GNOME to develop STEAM skills

Gameeky lets young learners and educators create and explore cooperative games and learning experiences.

More specifically:

• Play and explore games with friends.
• Create new games without writing any code.
• Tell stories through these games.
• Nurture artistic skills by designing game objects and creatures.
• Grasp the basics of programming using Python in a LOGO-like experience.
• Mature programming skills by extending games with Python plugins.

Gameeky is a learning tool in the shape of a game engine. Therefore, its primary goal is to provide a better learning experience for programming, arts and other STEAM-related skills. Read more about this project rationale here.

Gameeky is built completely on GNOME technologies.

Speaker: Martin Abente Lahaye

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10 You're always breaking GNOME

State of the Union of GNOME OS and what it takes to keep the whole world building.

We will go through all the recent changes in GNOME OS land, what's yet to come and how it makes the lives of developers easier.

We have an internal pad with the contents we want to cover here:

https://hedgedoc.gnome.org/guadec-2024-gnomeos-state-of?both#

Speakers: Jordan Petridis, Sam Thursfield (Volunteer), Valentin David

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13:05 Lunch Break

11 An update on parental controls for GNOME 47

In the GNOME 47 cycle, there have been some updates and renewed work on parental controls features and integration across GNOME. This talk will give an overview of what’s changed, what it means for apps and users, and future plans.

Speaker: Philip Withnall (Endless)

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12 Calendaring in the modern desktop

Between long and tedious RFCs, web-based alternatives, and non-compliant proprietary apps, GNOME Calendar still stands as one of the best calendaring apps out there - even when considering expensive proprietary alternatives. There are many low and high level challenges in this problem space, but specially over the past two years, significant improvements were made. Let's learn about what are these challenges, what the milestones recently achieved, the tricky usability, accessibility, and compliance challenges that the calendaring domain has, and ideas for the future.

Speakers: Georges Basile Stavracas Neto (Igalia), Hari Rana, Jean-François Fortin Tam

14:30 Break

13 Before they can come, you have to build it: Making your project accessible to new contributors

"If you build it, they will come." That's a nice sentiment; sometimes it works. Maybe that's how the charter members of your favorite open source project first came together. But not everybody has a magical sense of how to get involved with your project. And maybe it's time for fresh perspectives. How do you encourage new people to join your project?

Let's focus on one key element of success: accessibility. We will look at why accessibility matters in your open source project, common barriers encountered by users and contributors, and the impact improved accessibility can have on community growth. You will leave with some practical suggestions to improve accessibility in your project.

Speaker: Ms Krista Burdine (Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF))

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14 We Cannot Write Secure Applications

Humans are bad at writing secure code, and GNOME developers are no exception. GNOME is primarily written using unsafe programming languages where simple mistakes in our code lead to devastating consequences for our users, and we make these mistakes all the time. This talk will review several common programming errors in GNOME code and how to avoid them. But since we know we'll fail at that, we'll need the Flatpak sandbox to save users from the consequences of our mistakes. The Flatpak sandbox is incredible security technology, so why do we keep subverting it?

The GNOME and Flatpak communities must crack down on the widespread abuse of sandbox holes on Flathub and focus more on developing and improving our sandbox portals instead. Unsandboxed applications will never be safe, so it's time for GNOME distributors to move away from shipping traditionally-packaged applications and embrace Flatpak instead.

Speaker: Michael Catanzaro (Red Hat)

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15:00 Coffee Break

15 GNOME Crosswords, Year Three

Jonathan and Federico will give an update on GNOME Crosswords. This app is both a stand-alone game as well as a crossword puzzle editor. Over the past year, we have explored writing it as a stateless application with commutative widgets. It has also been used as a test-bed for porting a complex API to rust.

This talk will cover lessons learned, as well cover some of the intricacies of writing and solving crosswords.

Speakers: Federico Mena Quintero, Jonathan Blandford

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16 Snap and Ubuntu Core Desktop - Desktop Linux, as easy as a smartphone!

Immutable Linux distributions are talked about a lot. Ease of use and security by the operating system itself and also the applications in read-only file systems and isolated from each other, this an idea coming from smartphone operating systems.

Well before the immutable hype, a decade ago, Canonical, having given up on the smartphone operating system Ubuntu Touch, based on their experience with Touch, they created the immutable system Ubuntu Core, and Snap as packaging system for apps and components.

Later on, they established Snap as universal, distribution-independent packaging system for classic Linux distributions and the Snap Store started offering all kinds of applications, including desktop applications.

Out of that arose Canonical's approach of an immutable desktop distro, Ubuntu Core, with a desktop environment Snap added, Ubuntu Core Desktop.

This talk is about how all this works, the motivations, advantages, challenges, and state-of-the-art ...

Speaker: Till Kamppeter (OpenPrinting/Canonical)

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15:40 Break

17 Keynote

16:45 Quick Announcements

Saturday, 20 July

18 Keynote 2

11:00 Coffee Break

19 State of the shell

Another year has passed, another reason to celebrate the achievements of dozens of contributors. Let's talk about what was achieved in GNOME Shell, Mutter, and related components since last talk, and cover the highlights and latest development plans.

Speakers: Carlos Garnacho (Red Hat), Florian Müllner, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto (GNOME Foundation)

11:55 Break

20 Advances in Font Technology

In this two part talk, Behdad will talk about advances in the font format technology that are currently being standardized, which Matthias will talk about advances in GTK+ text rendering and what to do with Pango.

Speakers: Behdad Esfahbod, Matthias Clasen

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21 Building A GNOME Community In A Country Adapting The Open Source Culture

Building an Open Source Community dedicated to GNOME in a country adapting the open-source culture is full of challenges and opportunities. The talk will be focused on the formation of the GNOME Nepal community in Nepal. It will also focus on the grassroots initiatives taken for the establishment of the community and the activities it has been performing since its formation.

Speaker: Aaditya Singh (GNOME)

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12:45 Lunch Break

22 Empowering Open-Source Communities: Strategies for Building Contributor Engagement in Underrepresented Geographic Regions

Open-source projects strive to build communities of contributors in geographic areas where they have little or no presence. The goal of this talk is to provide strategies for engaging contributors in underrepresented regions. Certain geographic locations within open-source projects may have limited contributor engagement, posing unique challenges. These areas offer diverse potential contributors, necessitating tailored approaches to effectively engage and integrate new contributors.

Speaker: Regina Nkenchor (GNOME)

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23 Moving Past Quiet Introspection

One of the major advantages of the GNOME application development platform lies in its ability to be consumed by multiple programming languages, reaching potential new contributors and developers where they feel more comfortable. GObject Introspection is
now used not just for programming languages, but also for documenting and validating API. We are now moving the introspection format directly into the core of our platform, GLib, so that we can rely on it to a greater degree. Maintainers of platform libraries now have to be even more aware of how their API can be described, documented, and used
through introspection. In this presentation, I'll outline what happened, what's coming, and how best to live with introspection.

Speaker: Emmanuele Bassi

24 Title TBA

Speaker: Melissa Wu

14:35 Break

25 How can GNOME explore bigger concepts?

The Linux community is extremely creative with a wide range of experimental future looking projects. However, these projects often face a harsh reality of limited resources and support.

With flashy new technologies like VR headsets and LLMs to more practical improvements in tablets and cross-device ecosystems, there are a wide range of directions we could be exploring.

My UX research for Google (corporate) and Ink & Switch (Open Source), has shown me how similar this type of work actually is in practice: great ideas are independent of sponsorship. Our future doesn't have to be a copy of what the corporate world wants: we can build our own vision, free from myopic corporate constraints.

But how to we encourage this? How can we fund and build a range of explorations that find our own path? Let's call out what we want, then find out a way to make it happen.

Speaker: Scott Jenson (Self)

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26 State of security components in GNOME.

In this talk I will go through the changes/improvements done in gnome-keyring, gcr and libsecret for the GNOME 46 release, introduce the new D-Bus "Secret Service" provider and latest development plans to improve the infrastructure to manage secrets used by desktop applications.

Speaker: Dhanuka Warusadura

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15:05 Coffee Break

27 Cambalache: road to version 1.0

This talk will cover the roots a this new RAD tool for Gtk 4, the current status and the near future roadmap to version 1.0.
It will cover the basic architecture design and the recommended workflow for new application development.

Speaker: Juan Pablo Ugarte

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28 Showing Up for Python in GNOME

In December 2022, Emmanuele Bassi wrote a blog post as a call to arms to fix the undermaintained state of PyGObject and make improvements in a few key areas like fundamental types, constructing and disposing objects, and documentation.

Since then, Arjan Molenaar and I joined Christoph Reiter as maintainers. Although there is still a lot of work to do, the state of Python in GNOME has improved. This talk will provide an overview of:

1. The challenges of building up a GNOME community around an undermaintained project.
2. The exciting recent improvements to GNOME Python.
3. Where things are headed next and how others can help get involved.

Speaker: Dan Yeaw

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16:00 Break

29 Intern Lightning Talks

17:05 Quick Announcements

Sunday, 21 July

30 Annual General Meeting

Join us for the GNOME Foundation's Annual General Meeting (AGM). Hear updates from Executive Director, Holly Million, and the Foundation Board, ask questions, and learn about the Foundation's proposed Strategic Plan.

11:30 Coffee Break

31 Title TBA

12:25 Lunch Break

32 A phosh status update

Briefly introduce Phosh as a GNOME-based mobile platform. Highlight its unique features and advantages and its current development status.
Will also include:

• Recent Progress
• Community Highlight
• Looking ahead
• Call to action

Also will Encourage developers to try Phosh and contribute to its development. Invite users to test Phosh on their devices and provide feedback.
Highlight community channels and resources for getting involved.

Speakers: Arun Mani, Gotam Gorabh (GNOME Member)

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33 Supporting Home Directory Encryption

systemd-homed allows individual home directories to be encrypted with unique keys. This brings obvious privacy benefits, such as making it impossible access a logged-out user's files even as an administrator. It can also throw away your encryption keys when you suspend your device, increasing the security of laptops in their most-common state.

Thanks to work made possible by the STF grant, GNOME now integrates with systemd-homed. This talk describes what it took to get here, what new features it gives us, and what still remains to be done

Speaker: Adrian Vovk

13:50 Break

34 AI - Navigating the chaos

It's a hot new trend! So much hype but it's not something that is going to go away. As a project, we need to talk about about what's happening in this space and what we should do as a project from nothing to or to do some enabling. We'll talk about what is happening in AI space and what to watch out for.

Speaker: Sriram Ramkrishna

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35 Making WebKitGTK accessible again

Since the GTK4 port of WebKit was released, a major missing feature was the accessibility of the web contents. Accessibility technologies like Orca couldn't inspect what was the web content visible on screen. But as of GNOME 46, this is (mostly) fixed!

Let's deep dive into how WebKitGTK implements and exposes the accessible information of its web pages, how that conflicted with GTK4's expectations, and also discuss the current state, and potential future improvements.

Speaker: Georges Basile Stavracas Neto (Igalia)

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14:20 Coffee Break

36 Open Source Enthusiast and Educator supporting Malaysia Government Open Source Initiative

Sharing on how Ubuntu-MY LoCo team and EndlessOS Communities members helping Malaysia Government agencies in planning and implementing OSS as an alternative to Proprietary Software and Cost Saving. As part of it, OSS communities educate and promote OSS.

Speaker: Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman

37 The Whole Spiel - A New Speech Synthesis API

Screen reader users have relied on speech synthesis for a long time. In recent years, speech interfaces have become ubiquitous. They are used in many of our daily applications, such as assistants on our phones, smart speakers, navigation apps, and even web sites. With the advent of neural speech engines this domain has a lot of potential.

In this talk I will introduce Spiel, a new framework and library the lowers the barrier for both consuming speech and distributing high quality speech synthesizers on free platforms. I will give an overview of current state of speech APIs, and the opportunities a new speech framework, like Spiel, offers.

Speaker: Eitan Isaacson

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38 Somewhat merging gobject-introspection into GLib

In the GNOME 46 / GLib 2.80 cycle, large parts of gobject-introspection got merged into GLib. Why? What’s going on? How does this help anything? I will explain what this means for apps, bindings and documentation.

Speaker: Philip Withnall (GNOME Foundation)

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15:25 Break

39 Lightning Talks

40 Conference Closing