I’m organizing a mini docs hackfest during this year’s FOSDEM focused on updating the existing GNOME user documentation to account for the recent changes in GNOME Settings.
There has been some massive changes in the GNOME Settings interfaces in the past couple of years. New redesigns, the port to GTK4 and lots of new widgets from libadwaita. With that, lots of our user docs became outdated.
There are still ongoing UI changes in GNOME Settings that we should wait on their stabilization before writing documentation, for example:
- The Sharing settings are going away
- The Color settings might get split off into the Display and Printers panels
- The Sound panel is currently undergoing a redesign
- The Removable Media settings will get merged into the Applications panel
- The Default Applications Settings will get merged into the Applications panel
- A new (massive) System panel is in the works
Please, reply to this topic if you are interested in participating and/or if you have additional gnome-user-docs issues to add to the proposed agenda.
Proposed agenda
Here’s a list of new designs that are somewhat stable and yet have no docs or the existing ones are outdated:
- Document the Application settings
- Document the Multitasking settings
- Document the Search settings
- Document the Thunderbolt settings
- Document the Device Security settings
- Update the Accessibility settings
- The accessibility sections have been converted into subpages
- Some of the terms have changed
- Document the “About” settings
- File more issues against gnome-user-docs and reply to this topic to add it to this list
Currently we are discussing some locations to where to host the event. We will update this post once we have a confirmed date/time and place for the event.
Participants
- Felipe Borges
- Dominika Vagnerova
- Petr Kovar
- David King
- Don Naro
- Mariko
- reply to this topic if you are interested in participating
How to try the latest GNOME Settings
The best way to run GNOME Settings with the latest changes is to use a GNOME OS virtual machine in GNOME Boxes. Grab Boxes from Flathub and choose GNOME OS in the “Download an OS” option.
It is preferable to download and install the VM before the event, because this can take some time depending on network bandwidth and/or computer resources.
Alternatively, one can build GNOME Settings in Toolbx or use it’s (limited) Flatpak manifest to build it in GNOME Builder.