Shaping the future of GNOME: GUADEC 2024

Between 19-24 July, GUADEC, the annual conference for GNOME desktop users and developers, took place at the Tivoli Students Union in Denver, Colorado. A number of Codethings made the trip across the Atlantic to participate and present at the event.

For the second year in a row, this was a hybrid event. While the main event occurred in Denver, a satellite event was held in Berlin. This meant participants who couldn't make the trip could join virtually via streaming.

The Codethink team assisted with both events. Sam Thursfield and Martín Abente Lahaye attended the main event in Denver, while Jude Onyenegecha, Abderrahim Kitouni and Adrien Plazas went to Berlin.

The event consisted of three days of presentations and two days of workshops.

Presentations

Among the presentations, our team highlighted the keynotes from Ryan Sipes, “Thunderbird, The Death and Rebirth of an OSS Project”, an enlightening presentation about the importance of owning the story around your open source project, and Stephanie Taylor, "Google Summer of Code 20 years of OSS Mentorship", where she shared learnings from this mentorship program and how these can benefit similar programs and mentors.

Sam and other GNOME developers presented “You’re always breaking GNOME”, a summary of last year’s advancements in GNOME OS, including some of the contributions from Codethink through the recent collaboration with GNOME Foundation. Martin presented “Gameeky: A new learning tool”, his most recent project, which focused on learning, coding, and video games for GNOME.

Besides that, there were plenty of other exciting presentations. To mention a few:

• “The Whole Spiel - A New Speech Synthesis API” by Eitan Isaacson, who presented his work on modernising speech synthesis in Linux.
• “Making WebKitGTK accessible again” by Georges Stavracas, a deep dive into how WebKitGTK implements and exposes the accessible information of its web pages and how conflicts with GTK4's expectations were resolved.
• “GNOME and Sovereign Tech Fund (STF)” by Tobias Bernard, a summary of all incredible contributions made from this collaboration.

Plus, there were many other great presentations from the community.

Workshops

For the workshops, Sam helped lead a session on how GNOME OS utilises openQA for its end-to-end testing, guiding the audience through running and updating existing tests. This was a great opportunity to network and make good connections with new faces, some of whom were unfamiliar with openQA.

Other workshops covered interesting topics, such as the GNOME Foundation’s new five-year strategy, the Flatpak and Portals workshop, which covered key missing features like bundling system services with apps, and better integration of Flatpak extensions with running applications.

Social events

As part of the main event, our team participated in social events, including the classic GUADEC dinner at the end of the presentations, a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies, and a walking tour around Denver’s beautiful historic downtown.

Sponsored

Codethink is proud to have sponsored this year's GUADEC.

If you’d like to learn more about our work with GNOME or anything discussed in this article, please contact us via sales@codethink.co.uk.

Photos from the event courtesy of Dayne Pillow. Visit the full gallery here.