Wireless Displays & New System Panel Among GNOME’s GSoC Plans

A new system panel and wireless display connectivity are among the projects GNOME hopes to see worked on as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

The aim of GSoC is to bring new contributors into open source software development. Students adopt or propose projects under the guidance of an open source organization, whose existing developers help mentor students as they work on an idea over a 12 week period.

So what’s on the table this semester?

Well, a few things — but the following are the ones that have me most excited.

GNOME GSoC ’23

GNOME Settings (often referred to by its package name gnome-control-center) is where a ton of configuration options and system information resides, albeit split across several different top-level panels.

To bring some hierarchal order to things, GNOME devs want to move the following panels into a single, new top-level panel named ‘System‘, in line with other desktop operating systems.

• Region & Language
• Date & Time
• Users
• About

“Other platforms have a “system” section, so I think people are used to this concept. Also, we’ve tested the system panel design with users, and it has performed well,” explains GNOME designer Allan Day.

You can see a tentative design for the new “system” panel below. It helps reduce the number of sidebar entries considerably, helping the settings app feel a little more ordered and parseable for users (and more logical, by grouping relevant things together).

Pretty nice.

Sticking with Settings, another project under the auspices of GSoC ’23 is integrating GNOME Network Displays (currently a standalone application for casting a PC or laptop display via Miracast over the local network) with the GNOME Settings’ Display panel.

This will allow users to select a remote display from the same panel where they configure physical displays/monitors.

Wrapping Up

As GSoC is a process aimed at fostering contributions to open-source projects the fruits of planned efforts aren’t guaranteed to complete. Unexpected hurdles can crop up, implementation specifics may change, and so on — nothing is a given.

So don’t be too surprised if neither of these make it in to GNOME 45 this September — but fingers crossed they do.

For more details on these (and other) proposals check out GNOME’s GSoC ’23 ideas list.

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Source: OMG! Linux