Using GNOME OS to test changes

For about four major releases now I’ve been having ugly stuttering issues, specially in the overview animations, while most other people have been praising the impressive performance improvements GNOME has had lately. It’s clear that mine is a specific issue related to my not exceptional but still minoritary hardware setup: 4K screen and integrated Intel GPU. Many PRs were proposed (and some of them merged) meanwhile that at first seem to be related to my issue but after each release at best nothing changed on that front, at worst I’ve suffered slight regressions. The impression I got from all this is that the issue is mostly flying under the radar because developers may be using other hardware configurations (probably the popular FHD screens that Lenovo and Dell ship). As of late some of this has been recognized and there are ongoing initiatives (obviously !1441 and its predecessors, but maybe also !1241) that target a problem that seems to be mine. Still I’m afraid that this might end up in another disappointment, although this is not about my feelings but about the inability to test changes in my hardware and provide feedback to developers using different setups for issues that are highly hardware sensitive. The recent GNOME OS announcements seem promising in this regard. So is it ready to test, say, a build of mutter with !1441 merged or, more generally, a build using the branch for some PR? If that’s already possible, could you hint me a bit about how to get it working? Thank you very much!

Hi,
For instructions on how to get GNOME OS in a VM, see GNOME OS call for testing (+BuildStream workshop). It’s also possible to install on bare metal, although this isn’t the main focus. So far @valentindavid has been focusing on Pinebook as far as I know and documenting it here.

It’s very much possible to build your own image from a branch of the gnome-build-meta repo. To test an unmerged branch of mutter, you’d need a branch that updates the track: field of mutter.bst to the corresponding mutter.git branch name. Push and the CI will build it for you. When that completes, the green tick icon next to the CI pipeline will give the option of starting an x86_64 VM image build, which you can then download.

If your use case is testing a change that affects only one package, and you want to run it on real hardware, you will probably get quicker results patching and rebuilding the ‘mutter’ package provided by your distro. The way to do this depends on your distro – best to ask in the appropriate distro related forum

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