Google announced the GSoC 2022 projects, and the list includes some exciting 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 strengthen the existing FOSS applications.
This year is the program’s 18th year, which received over 4000 applications from students across 96 countries and a whopping 5155 proposals submitted. Some interesting ones are famous free and open-source projects such as LibreOffice, Debian, Ubuntu, GNOME, etc.
Here in this article, we filtered out some of the critical projects from the GSOC 2022.
Google Summer of Code (GSOC) – 2022 – Foss Projects
The famous multimedia framework – FFMPEG, which is probably the backbone of millions of programs and commercial applications, expects two improvements. The first one is to implement an ISO ITU-T Rec. T.814 compliant High Throughput jpeg2000 decoder for FFmpeg. Second, some popular formats would be written in CUDA C++ (by NVIDIA)so that FFMPEG can process them via GPU for faster output.
Debian
The primary project involving Debian is implementing and including the complete Android SDK in Debian’s package base. The main objective is to complete the Andoird development experience with all the necessary components.
Tor Project
Tor project expects improvements in the OONI probe tool to detect TSL middleboxes and port-filtering detection. In addition, Tor Weather implementation should help the relay tracking and tracing.
GNU Octave
The popular GNU Octave project expects the octsympy package inclusion in its feature with a clear roadmap for the future. Furthermore, the TIFF image support improvements on the cards with the libtiff library. Also, improvements are expected in ordinary differential equations (ODEs) interfaces with MATLAB compatibility this year.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice project expects two improvements via GSOC 2022. The first one is to improve the VBA Macros in Writer. The second one is to implement and support the Z compressed file formats .wmz and .emz, which currently can’t be opened by LibreOffice. Also, this work is expected to implement the saving of the files in those formats as well.
GNOME
The GNOME project overall plans for many exciting changes. First of all, the GNOME health app expects to extend itself to sync via Apple Health, NextCloud Health, and other services.
Secondly, the GNOME Network Display program might get Chromecast support as part of this year’s GSOC. Currently, it only supports MIracast. When implemented, you can project your GNOME desktop to Chromecast devices.
In addition to the above changes, Nautilus (Files) new document module expects a major overhaul as described below (from the project):
- Exposing an entire tree of possible templates in a single view, instead of nested submenus.
- Making use of visual representations of each template, such as icons, to help users find what they’re looking for.
- Always showing the New Documents menu, even if the Templates directory is empty – in that case, offer the user the ability to add new templates, both pre-defined as well as custom.
- Add the ability to search the list of templates.
- Add the ability to quickly rename the newly created files.
It will be interesting how these pan out in the final version of Nautilus.
Pitivi Editor
The underrated video editor Pitivi promises some massive updates. The project planned for the GTK4 and libadwaita conversion of the Pitivi editor will be significant. Furthermore, a handful of bug fixes and enhancements for Pitivi’s timeline is expected.
KDE Community
The KDE applications expect some exciting changes as part of this project. Among these, the Discover improvements are perhaps the most important. Here is a quick summary.
- Pixel-perfect ellipses in Krita
- Export an Image to SVG in Krita
- New plugin to process Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in DigiKam
- Permission Management for Flatpak and Snap Application in Discover (this will be a game-changer)
- New activities to GCompris
Other projects
In addition to the above projects, many other open-source projects expect some well-defined work as part of GSOC 2022, which you can browse the link below.
We hope that the project continues smoothly for all the contributors to these stunning open-source projects. The coding begins on June 13, 2022, with final work submission expected between September 5th and 12th, 2022. And the last evaluation date is on November 28, 2022.
Finally, visit the official website and schedule if you want to learn more.
Via blog.
