Automated testing is important to ensure software continues to behave as it is intended and it’s part of more or less all modern software projects, including GNOME Shell and many of the dependencies it builds upon. However, as with most testing, we can always do better to get more complete testing. In this post, we’ll dive into how we recently improved testing in GNOME Shell, and what this unlocks in terms of future testability.| GNOME Shell & Mutter
GNOME Kiosk is a separate Wayland compositor built on the same core components as GNOME Shell, such as Mutter. While it does not provide a desktop UI, it is intended for kiosk and appliance use cases. Originally designed to run a single application in fullscreen mode, recent development has expanded its scope toward more versatile … Continue reading "GNOME Kiosk Updates"| GNOME Shell & Mutter
One of the things we’re tackling as part of the STF infrastructure initiative is improving notifications. Other platforms have advanced significantly in this area over the past decade, while we still have more or less the same notifications we had since the early GNOME 3 days, both in terms of API and feature set. There’s … Continue reading "Notifications in 46 and beyond"| GNOME Shell & Mutter
By now it is probably no longer news to many: GNOME Shell moved from GJS’ own custom imports system to standard JavaScript modules (ESM). Imports? ESM? JavaScript originated in web browsers to add a bit of interactivity to otherwise static pages. There was no need to split up small code snippets into multiple files, so … Continue reading "Extensions in GNOME 45"| GNOME Shell & Mutter
TL;DR: The gnome-shell-sass repository is no longer getting updated upstream. Background As gnome-shell’s CSS grew more complex, designers needed something more expressive, so they started compiling the stylesheet from SASS. The sources were moved to a subproject, so they could be shared between the regular stylesheet and the GNOME Classic stylesheet. Fast-forward to the present … Continue reading "GNOME Shell styling changes: A PSA for theme authors"| GNOME Shell & Mutter
On Wayland, a surface is the basic primitive used to build what users refer to as a “window”. Wayland clients define their contents by attaching buffers to surfaces. This turns the contents of the buffer into the current surface contents. Wayland clients are free to attach a new buffer to a surface anytime. When a … Continue reading "Ensuring steady frame rates with GPU-intensive clients"| GNOME Shell & Mutter
Automated testing is important to ensure software continues to behave as it is intended and it’s part of more or less all modern software projects, including GNOME Shell and many of the dependencies it builds upon. However, as with most testing, we can always do better to get more complete testing. In this post, we’ll … Continue reading "Automated testing of GNOME Shell"| GNOME Shell & Mutter
As part of the design process for what ended up becoming GNOME 40 the design team worked on a number of experimental concepts, a few of which were aimed at better support for tablets and other smaller devices. Ever since then, some of us have been thinking about what it would take to fully port...| GNOME Shell & Mutter
Focus stealing prevention exists for two main reasons: One is security, since we need to prevent rogue apps from deceiving users into e.g. typing their password into another window. If apps can silently claim keyboard focus and open their own window over the currently focused one, this enables phishing and other similar attacks. The other is user experience: Even if an app isn’t maliciously taking over your focus, it can be annoying to have a new window popping up while you’re typing some...| GNOME Shell & Mutter
Focus stealing prevention exists for two main reasons: One is security, since we need to prevent rogue apps from deceiving users into e.g. typing their password into another window. If apps can silently claim keyboard focus and open their own window over the currently focused one, this enables phishing and other similar attacks. The other...| GNOME Shell & Mutter
It’s been a while since the last update on GNOME Shell mobile, but there’s been a huge amount of progress during that time, which culminated in a very successful demo at the Prototype Fund Demo Day last week.| GNOME Shell & Mutter
