At the GUADEC 2020 conference, a report was made on the development of the project "Gnome OS" in which a plan is released to develop "Gnome OS" as a platform for creating OS now transformed into consideration as a set that can be used for continuous integration, simplify work applications in tests developed for the next version of the Gnome code base, development assessment, hardware compatibility testing and user interface experimentation.
You have to remember that the initiative to create Gnome OS emerged in 2012 in order to be able to address the problems of GNOME development and also offer several ideas to increase the demand for the platform.
So far all compilations by "Gnome OS" they were designed to run in virtual machines.
And now cWith the new initiative, it aims to with the work that has been done now it can be ensured that "Gnome OS" be used on real hardware.
With that new builds are being developed for x86_64 and ARM systems (Pinebook Pro, Rock 64, Raspberry Pi 4). Compared to builds for virtual machines, added the ability to boot into systems with UEFI, power management tools, printing support, Bluetooth, WiFi, sound cards, microphone, touch screens, graphics cards and webcams, plus missing Flatpak portals for GTK + added. Flatpak packages prepared for application development (GNOME Builder + SDK).
To form the system that completes the Gnome operating system, the OSTree system is used (the system image is atomically updated from a Git-like repository), by analogy with the Fedora Silverblue and Endless OS projects.
Initialization is done with Systemd. The graphical environment is based on the drivers Mesa, Wayland and XWayland. It is suggested to use Flatpak to install additional applications, while the installer is the Endless OS installer based on the initial Gnome configuration.
Gnome is committed to the environment
Another topic that was addressed at GUADEC 2020 It was a proposal to consider the environmental impact of the development of Gnome applications. For each application, It is suggested to show a parameter "Carbon Cost", which shows the approximate level of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere which allows evaluating how development affects global warming.
According to the speaker, even though free software is provided free of charge, it comes at an indirect price: the impact of development on the environment.
For example, a project's server infrastructure, continuous integration servers, the Gnome Foundation, and developer conferences require electricity and carbon dioxide-emitting materials from manufacturing processes. The applications also consume energy in the user's systems, which also indirectly affects the environment.
The introduction of the new metric will show that the project GNOME is serious about preserving the environment.
The factors to calculate the metric k are the execution timen of the application, the load on the CPU, storage and network, the intensity of the tests in the continuous integration system.
To evaluate the load, it is proposed to use sysprof, systemd and powertop accounting mechanisms, whose data can be converted to the equivalent of carbon dioxide emissions.
For example, 1 hour of CPU intensive load can be estimated as approximately 20 W or 6 grams of CO2e, and 1 GB of data downloaded over the network as 17 grams of CO2e. With regard to continuous integration systems, the Glib set is estimated at 48 kilograms of CO2e per year (in comparison, one person produces 4.1 tons of CO2e per year).
To reduce the cost of carbon, developers are encouraged to implement optimizations such as caching, improving code efficiency, reducing network load, and applying predefined images in a continuous integration system, thus helping to fight global warming.
For example, using out-of-the-box flattened images in a continuous integration system will reduce the value of the metric by 4 times.
For each major release, it is suggested to calculate a Cumulative Carbon Cost that summarizes the metrics for all applications, plus the costs of the GNOME Project, GNOME Foundation, Hackfests, and Continuous Integration.
This metric will allow to carry out the development taking into account the impact on the environment, to monitor the dynamics and carry out the appropriate optimizations.
They could start by taking gnome to be usable in an audio / video distro in real time without consuming a high percentage of microprocessor and memory, as KDE did with Plasma 5 ... I mean ...