Welcome to GUADEC! This is the official opening of the event.
While the D-Bus "Secret Service" API is integrated well in the GNOME desktop through gnome-keyring and libsecret, the architecture is getting outdated as flatpak apps come to the fore. One of the biggest problems of the current architecture is that the secrets are not properly isolated per application and that allows one application to request another application's secrets.
To address this,...
The Free and Open Source Software community has a tendency to bring about the best and the worst in us – the polarization due in no small amount to the voice that FOSS provides to both users and developers alike. Developers are not shielded behind a faceless organization, but rather have their identity posted front and center with each controversial change. Likewise, users have direct outlets...
It's been over two years since we've made the initial transition and this talk will have a retrospective on the impact the move has on the project, but what also can we do to continue to make a better experience. This talk will be both a review of metrics and a brainstorming session on further projects that we can pursue.
Since the dawn of time, gnome-session has been the venerable session manager the GNOME desktop. It is responsible for starting the display manager, auto-starting applications, providing a session management API over D-Bus, and much more.
Nowadays we can do better. We've had systemd around and capable of managing user sessions as well as system services for some time now. It offers us the...
Browser technology over the past decade has taught us practical lessons about how to increase application security through the use of sandboxes. However, sandboxes seem to necessarily require using multiple processes to limit damage from various software components. You don't want a bug in your image decoder to exploit access your email and contact databases, potentially corrupting or...
Home-automation enthusiasts have a lot of free-software options — at least for controlling lights, appliances, thermostats, and other such embedded devices. Even FOSS media centers (like Kodi) and smartphones get in on the action. But, ironically, the one piece of computing equipment that remains woefully isolated from the rest of the connected house is the Linux desktop. This talk will...
Hack is a new GNOME-based learning project that teaches kids to code. In this talk we will give a high-level overview of Hack, and the different components which are integrated in a real operating system (Endless OS): the games, the toolbox to modify their source code, the quest system to guide the player, and the inter-process communication systems that we use to glue everything together.
This talk will provide an introduction to the portal architecture, including design principles for the user experience and the API design.
A year after Flatpak 1.0, we can also take a look back at lessons learned from using portals in a wide range of applications:
What works well, what doesn't?
What are the most sorely missing portals?
Which ones turned out to be unnecessary?
How can...
AR and VR did not only introduce a new class of output devices, but with tracked controllers and hands also the requirement for a new set of user interactions. This talk investigates solutions in existing implementations and points out how the classical UX model with keyboard and mouse translates to these new devices. The technical aspect of these requirements will also be highlighted. The...
Another GUADEC, another Shell talk. This session will cover the highlights in mutter and gnome-shell development, as well as the ongoing plans.
Health must remain a non-negotiable human right. GNU Health is a social project that uses technology and the Libre Software philosophy to provide Freedom and Equity in healthcare.
In my talk I will address the importance of Free/Libre Software in the Public Health, data governance, privacy, and the need for a universal implementation of a person/patient unique ID. I will discuss...
How environmentally friendly is GNOME, both the software and the project? What can we do to make it better, at a technical level and at a social level? This is going to be a talk of observations, and maybe some thoughts about solutions, but I don’t have all the answers. Graphs may be involved.
What is Imposter Syndrome and why we need to discuss it?
Impostor Syndrome is the feeling that you aren’t actually qualified for the work you are doing and will be discovered as a fraud. It is prevalent amongst a lot of members of open tech/culture, especially people from underrepresented backgrounds, many of whom have been socialised to value other’s opinion of their work above their own,...
Sandboxing is an important part of modern security and as of WebKitGTK 2.26 it is able to sandbox its web processes. This talk will cover how WebKitGTK using applications can enable it as well as go into the technical details of how the sandbox is implemented.
Africa, we believe, is a totally unique market/audience in terms of accessing and using technologies. We have run technology communities and organised technology events in Kenya for almost 5 years which we would share our experiences up to this point. We will also give proposals for what we think is a better approach into achieving better penetration and adoption of GNOME in terms of users and...
Boxes have been a mainstay of how user interfaces are built with GTK; all UIs are constructed by packing controls into boxes, grids, and bins, and controlling the alignment and expansion flags until they reach the desired layout.
This is going to change with the next major release of GTK, 4.0. With the introduction of layout managers, we don't need complex containers with a single layout...
What to expect from Unconscious Bias training and why is it relevant?
People make, and sometimes act on, snap judgments based on the other person’s race, without any conscious intention. The training will begin with demonstrations of how the mind operates in such ways that are outside of conscious awareness or control. We will then move on to enable attendees to understand and identify such...
The flatpak base runtime provided by the freedesktop-sdk project is the runtime which GNOME and KDE runtimes are based on. It's also the base for any flatpak app that uses those runtimes or the freedesktop-sdk runtime directlyIn this talk we will discuss new improvements the community have made during the 18.08 release cycle, and we will also present what new updates and features we have been...
Short overview of the application icon style redesign and a demo of designing an application icon using Icon Preview and Inkscape.
This talk is about the GNOME user experience: the experience of those using GNOME software. In particular, it is about where that UX needs to go, and how we can get there. In the first half of the talk, I'll talk about strategy: what GNOME's goals and priorities need to be, if we want to succeed. I'll start by talking about where the desktop is positioned in 2019, and what the opportunities...
Over the past 4 years, GNOME has been creating the Builder IDE to radically reduce the difficulty in contributing to the Linux desktop. It has brought a number of new contributors to desktop Linux by simplifying common procedures such as setting up build environments and guiding newcomers; all while supporting a number of programming languages.
To make this possible, the Builder team helped...
We go to great lengths to ensure a consistent and smooth experience to those who use GNOME, but do we do the same for those who make it?
This talk is about the multitude of challenges, joys, glooms, and routine of being a GNOME application maintainer. The idea came after writing about being a free software maintainer [1], and observing the massive repercussion it had. Turns out, we barely...
The easiest way to host a flatpak is to let someone else do it, like Flathub. However, one of the main strengths of flatpak is the distributed nature which allows anyone to host a repository, and sometimes you need it. Or maybe you are just interested in how it works?
This talk will explain how a flatpak repository works, and the various alternatives when it comes to hosting it. This will...
Every year, the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors sets aside some time at GUADEC for the Annual General Meeting (AGM). Everyone is invited to attend the AGM and hear updates on what has been happening at GNOME for the last year, and also to get to know the new Board members and ask any questions that they may have. If there are any items requiring a vote by the Foundation membership to...
User research is a crucial point for following a user-centered design approach. However, smaller teams may not have the resources to prioritize it.
In this session, we will cover the value of doing research, choosing the right methods. Organizing and running research in just a few steps with minimal resources, to get user feedback that will help improve your product.
These methods can be...
Cassidy has been observing and researching dark styles in consumer software for several months, and conducted a user study with over 1,500 participants. In this talk he shares his research, observations, prior art, and requirements for a dark style preference on FreeDesktop platforms.
The Linux desktop is dead. At least, this has been the claim of many people. But is it really? So many core platforms have moved to open source software over the past decade. Although Windows now includes a copy of Linux, the desktop has not moved. While mobile phones have taken the world's attention, the desktop is still the primary work and study platform, and average use has continued to...
Hardening built into the operating system without compromising on usabilityThe attack surface of USB is quite large and while disabling USB altogether solves the problem, it creates many other. As do existing protection mechanisms. They suffer from poor usability and missing integration into the operating system. We present our approach to defending against rogue USB devices for a GNOME-based...
Historically, accessibility features in GNOME on X11 were handled by different components such as Xorg itself for keyboard accessibility, “mousetweaks” for mouse accessibility, GNOME settings daemon for locate pointer, AT-SPI registry daemon, etc.
All these features relied on the ability to query the input devices on behalf of other clients or generate fake input events, neither of which is...
The GNOME desktop is based on a Javascript engine, and there are some long-running and much-discussed problems around Javascript's garbage collection. This past year I've been working on a solution to the garbage collection problems in GJS, an initiative nicknamed "taking out the garbage". This talk will have a short technical portion about taking out the garbage, as well as some of the cool...
GNOME Mobile has come a long way since last year's GUADEC. We now have all the main widgets needed to make GNOME apps adaptive, i.e. work well across all form factors from phone, to tablet, to desktop. A number of core and third-party apps have already been ported, and new apps are being built with to be adaptive from the start. In this talk I'll give an overview of the most important adaptive...
While the EU's GDPR and ePrivacy (now undergoing reform) provide people with additional control over their personal data, they do expect organisations to perform significant adjustments to their processes and workflows and to implement particular measures. Most open-source projects, including GNOME, make no exception and are consequently expected to comply with the extensive legal and...
The GNOME Foundation has seen some generous donations recently, and we are now seeing the impact of these with new staff coming on board at the Foundation. This talk will look at the future of the Foundation and the project, and highlight key plans for the future growth of GNOME.
My presentation covers the work I developed during my internship with GNOME. From what is usability, what is usability testing, how important it is to do usability tests on in free/open source software to how to do usability testing on your own and how to report useful results. I'll give a brief explanation about what I learned from my internship with GNOME, especially with usability.
Free software will not win by "merely" replacing proprietary software. We need to lead with a vision of how the world could be. A voluntary community, one where people participate by choice, does not have to replicate the power structures, gate-keeping or casual cruelty of the systems it seeks to replace. We could make free software the most empowering place to build software. Free software...
Another year, another GUADEC comes to a close. This session finishes off GUADEC 2019!
