Early version of the new GNOME OS installer shown off in video

Last week, we wrote about the fact that the GNOME project was working on a new installer for GNOME OS. At the time, the development was still early and there wasn’t even a git repository for the code, but this week, we have been given a video of the installer, it’s not finished yet but we can get a good idea of how it’ll look eventually.

Since last week, a new GitLab repository been set up for the project and the developer has settled on the navigation, deciding what to show next and other “internals”. The basic page layouts for the installer have also been done but many of the pages don’t yet fully work, you can see the progress below:

The installer and other developments are being worked on under the auspices of the GNOME Sovereign Tech Fund initiative. In the latest update, it was revealed that there were major issues on the GNOME Foundation side of things and they were hoping the issue would be resolved soon. If it isn’t, they warned that the coordination of projects could be affected meaning “the future of parts of the project is uncertain.”

Hopefully, this issue, whatever it is, is resolved soon. Here are the full highlights of what they’ve been working on this week:

Felix completed the the refactor of the Flatpak side of Key Rack. This is an important basis for the next steps (automatic updating of Flatpak items on changes, adding new items, etc.).

Adrien continued porting Baobab away from GtkTreeView and to GtkColumnView and ported Baobab to use CSS variables for Adwaita’s named colors.

Dorota continued work on her prototype portal implementation for testing, updated the portal trigger, and fixed the MR to shuffle around things in settings before the globalshortcuts part can go in, among other smaller things.

Joanie continued working on getting rid of formatting.py in Orca, and a number of other minor Orca issues and cleanups.

Abderrahim moved sysupdate configuration to the main sysupdate directory (as part of the extensions) and reviewed and merged an MR to split out debug to a sysext and tarball for debuginfod, which should help reduce image size.

Martín worked on various aspects of tooling for development and testing on immutable OSes, including putting together a developer story to solicit feedback, and writing a minimalist snippet for generating sysext images.

Neill worked on tooling for checking CVEs in GNOME OS, landing MRs to allow generate_cve_report.py and update_local_cve_database.py to be used by other builds and adding tables of unversioned elements of git/archive sources to generate_cve_report.py. He also wrote a script and modified CI to populate Gitlab Pages with the CVE reports for master and all stable branches.

Hub worked on adding USB portal support to ashpd. It can now exercise the portal, including obtain a device that can then then be opened with libusb (rusb). This allowed fixing many issues in the portal implementation, including assert on API misuses, and state handling.

Sam fixed several small issues introduced in the GNOME Shell high contrast refactor, including extraneous padding in icon-shadows, menu item background hover fixes, an app grid margin issue in Large Text mode, and a symbolic themed icon contrast fix in notifications.

Sam also continued work on the File Chooser Portal Open and Save dialog mockups, and updated mic sensitivity symbolic icons in Adwaita to fix visibility issues in the Shell.

Julian continued to work on the notification grouping in GNOME Shell and looked into focus stealing prevention, filing issues and implementing fixes for some of them.

Andy worked on Online Accounts, including porting to AdwDialog/AdwAlertDialog and separating OAuth2 browser process.

Dhanuka continued working on implementing the oo7-daemon Secret Prompt. They implemented base64 payload parsing for SecretExchange, implemented org.gnome.keyring.Prompter interface based on SecretExchange, and integrated SecretExchange into the prompt as a test.

Adrian worked on the new installer for GNOME OS, settling on the way the internals (navigation, deciding what page to show next, etc) will work and implementing most of the basic page layouts following the designs (though many of the pages don’t fully work yet).