Google announced the GSoC 2021 projects and the list includes some interesting improvements to the mainstream foss projects such as GNOME, Xfce, LibreOffice, etc. Take a look.
Google Summer of Code is a yearly competition where it accepts project proposals from students across the world to improve open-source projects. It’s a popular worldwide summer program sponsored by Google and other sponsors where students get awards by finishing the accepted projects to improve the existing foss applications.
This year is the 17th year of the program which received 6991 applications from 4795 students across 103 countries. And 1292 students are selected from 68 countries and the list consists of some additions and improvements to the mainstream FOSS projects.
The list is quite large. However, I have summarised them below filtered by the main and popular foss projects.
Google Summer of Code – GSoC 2021 – Foss Projects
LibreOffice
- Some of the common and annoying user experience LibreOffice bugs that are part of the “100 Paper Cuts” list are expected to be fixed. You can refer to the list here on the TDF site. However, which of them is selected as part of this project is unknown at the moment.
- Improving the LibreOffice testbed (unit test) for bug fixes that currently do not have any test written. The project expects to write them as per the bug priority order.
- Implement the interface for external data provides while doing data import in Calc which was removed as part of this commit.
- Improving the DOCX compatibility for Table Styles with many additions. Hopefully, it solves many compatibility issues of opening and working with MS Office .docx formats.
- Improving the tests for the VCL graphics backend.
GNOME
- Customize IBus Extension project aims to make IBus themes separate from the current GNOME-Shell theme and GTK theme so that users can customize it with other available GNOME-Shell themes and GTK themes.
- Faces of GNOME project plans to build a web portal to showcase the GNOME Contributors over the years in a proper and structured way with profiles and other details of the contributors.
- GNOME’s built-in screenshot and screen-recorder utility to be merged into a single UI as part of this project with additional improvements.
- Multi-account support is expected to the GNOME’s Matrix messaging client ‘Fractal’ as part of this project.
- The GNOME Health app expects a main view design overhaul as part of this project which was planned in GitLab.
- Better resource management in the GNOME desktop is planned in this project which uses the systemd, cgroups, and slices. This project expects to improve GNOME performance and responsiveness.
VLC
- Realtime subtitle generation using Machine Learning ?️
- VLC Qt interface redesign
- VLC macOS interface redesign
- Making the VLC iOS app a one-stop shop for all the media consumption and management
Pidgin
- This project idea would focus on making the account adding process easier for everyone by introducing an Account assistant for Pidgin3.
GStreamer
- Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the latest video compression standard after HEVC. VVC Parsar’s work starts with this project.
Debian
- Package Caddy web server for Debian
- Quality Assurance and Continuous Integration for Applications in Life Sciences and Medicine in Debian
- Kotlin & Gradle work for Android Tools project for Debian
Xfce
- XFCE4 panel plugin development in Python and JavaScript (currently written on C).
digiKam
- Port digiKam to Qt6 on Linux
- Faces engine Improvements
- digiKam Image Quality Sorter algorithms improvement
The overall list is interesting and we hope these get completed. And the end-users get to use the new features. The program is expected to begin its coding phase on June 7th and expected to be completed by August 16th.
For more details, visit the project page.
