I will stop maintaining GNOME Initial Setup when the 48.1 release is made, by 12th April 2025. It will of course continue to work as-is, and since it’s not been particularly actively developed of late you may not notice much difference in the near term!
To move GNOME’s first-boot/-login experience forward, new volunteers will be needed, either to maintain and refresh the existing codebase, or to turn the skeleton Setup app started by Adrian Vovk as part of his work on GNOME OS into a functioning first-boot experience that can be swapped in. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you want any advice or pointers.
When I took on Initial Setup in 2018, I hoped to be able to contribute the code & experience we gained from shipping various improvements & changes in Endless OS’s branch, as well as improving it more generally for GNOME and Endless OS. downstream changes and more generally, to support Endless OS and other GNOME distributions. We did get some nice changes upstream over the years since then – a better Wi-Fi selection page, integrated parental controls onboarding, and the GTK 4 port come to mind – but I’ve never found myself able to spend as much time on the project as I had hoped to, so my maintenance has been more reactive than proactive. Over the years my work at Endless has drifted ever further from Endless OS and GNOME, so at this point I need to formally hand over the maintenance hat.
Thanks to the many contributors who have helped to keep the project going!