Last year, I presented the GNOME 3.22 core applications: a recommendation for which GNOME applications have sufficiently-high general appeal that they should be installed out-of-the-box by operating systems that wish to ship the GNOME desktop the way that upstream intends. We received some complaints that various applications were missing from the list, but I was pretty satisfied with the end result. After all, not every high-quality application is going to have wide general appeal, and not every application with general appeal is going to meet our stringent design standards. It was entirely intentional there was not any email client (none met our standards) or chat application (IRC does not have general appeal) included, nor any developer tools (most people aren’t software developers). Our classification was, necessarily, highly-opinionated.
For GNOME 3.24, the list of core applications did not change.
For GNOME 3.26, I’m pleased to announce the addition of three new applications: GNOME Music, GNOME To Do, and Simple Scan. Distributions that choose to follow our recommendation should add these applications to their default install.
Music and To Do have spent the past year maturing. No software is perfect, but these applications are now good enough that it’s time for them to reach a wider audience and hopefully attract some new contributors. In particular, Music has had another major performance improvement that should make it more pleasant to use.
In contrast, Simple Scan has been a mature app for a long time, and has long followed GNOME design guidelines. I’m very happy to announce that development of Simple Scan has moved to GNOME infrastructure. I hope that GNOME will be a good home for Simple Scan for a long time to come.
The full list of core applications for GNOME 3.26 is as follows:
- Archive Manager (File Roller)
- Boxes
- Calculator
- Calendar (gnome-calendar, not california)
- Characters (gnome-characters, not gucharmap)
- Cheese
- Clocks
- Contacts
- Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab)
- Disks (gnome-disk-utility)
- Document Viewer (Evince)
- Documents
- Files (Nautilus)
- Fonts (gnome-font-viewer)
- Help (Yelp)
- Image Viewer (Eye of GNOME)
- Logs (gnome-logs, not gnome-system-log)
- Maps
- Music
- Photos
- Screenshot
- Software
- Simple Scan
- System Monitor
- Terminal
- Text Editor (gedit)
- To Do
- Videos (Totem)
- Weather
- Web (Epiphany)
We are now up to 30 core apps! We are not likely to go much higher than this for a while. What changes are likely in the future? My hope is that within the next year we can add Credentials, a replacement for Seahorse (which is not listed above due to quality issues), remove Disk Usage Analyzer and System Monitor in favor of a new Usage app, and hopefully remove Archive Manager in favor of better support for archives in Files. But it’s too early for any of that now. We’ll have to wait and see how things develop!
