14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME developer Carlos Soriano, known for his contributions to the Nautilus file manager and GNOME Shell user interface, reports on the latest progress made to simplify the contribution process to the GNOME Project.
GNOME Project is the Red Hat sponsored organization behind the well-known GNOME desktop environment, which is used by default on numerous Linux-based operating systems, including Debian, OpenSuSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and even Ubuntu.
Popular desktop environments like Cinnamon, Unity, MATE, and Budgie are based on the GNOME Stack, but GNOME remains one of the most prolific mature Linux desktops of all time, along with KDE. Contributions to the GNOME desktop were possible in the past, but they were recently made accessible to practically anyone.
"You might know we have been working for years on materializing what we wanted the future of contribution to be, we did multiple iterations and we worked full time on our developer experience," said Carlos Soriano. "...and finally, I’m glad to announce, we achieved it, we have a new way to contribute to GNOME."
The GNOME Builder IDE and latest Flatpak technologies helped a lot
Looking at the screenshots attached below, we can see that anyone who has the newest version of the GNOME desktop environment installed, along with the open-source GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment), can clone a certain GNOME app or component by specifying its Git URL.
No specific distribution or version is required to build the project with GNOME Builder, and all dependencies are grabbed automatically. When the project has been successfully built, you can run it from within the IDE. It won't take more than five minutes to download and build the project, make modifications, and contribute.
According to the GNOME developer, this opens a new world for contributors, which couldn't be possible without the hard work of Flatpak creator Alex Larsson and GNOME Builder developer Christian Hergert. "Finally the benefit is here, the future we imagined and shaped 5 years ago is coming together, and it’s shining," added Carlos Soriano to his latest blog post.
