A new website called Apps For GNOME has been launched with the intention of showcasing the best applications in the GNOME ecosystem.

Until now there has been no single listing of the apps available for GNOME, and the intention of Apps For GNOME is that it will provide potential users with a comprehensive directory.

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero and has become one of the largest open source projects. It is best known for its desktop, which is a key part of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE and Fedora and also has a long history of producing critical pieces of software infrastructure. The GNOME Foundation, a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, was formed in 2000.

Writing about the new website, Sophie Herold, one of the main drivers for its creation, pointed out that currently, most apps in the GNOME ecosystem are represented by a wiki page or README at the GitLab instance. All the information in these wiki pages has to be updated manually in parallel to the other sources like the AppStream MetaInfo file, the screenshots, or the DOAP file.

Herold says:

"I was no longer motivated to do this work manually for my app and started looking for alternative solutions. I quickly wrote a small script that generates an app page. After showing the generated page around, several people proposed to provide such app pages in a centralized fashion for GNOME."

The app pages on the new website are designed to increase user participation, with ways to provide feedback, translation, or financial support of the project. It also provides up-to-date information, mainly drawn from existing metadata from the software or on Flathub, reducing the work for app maintainers in keeping information up-to-date.

More importantly, the website will feature apps that don’t fit on Flathub. Herold says that:

"It’s not technically feasible to distribute apps like Software, Files, or Terminal on Flathub. Apps for GNOME gives those apps the web presence they are missing out on Flathub."

Apps For GNOME is now live.

More Information

Apps For GNOME

Sophie Herold's Blog

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