14 DAY TRIAL // Long-time GNOME developer Richard Hughes talks in his latest blog post about a new tool that will be integrated in future versions of the GNOME desktop environment to make deployments of firmware updates easier for all users.
At the moment, the GNOME Software Center only displays devices when firmware updates are pending, but Richard Hughes and Andrew Schwenn, an intern from Dell, have been working lately on a new tool that would be integrated as a panel into GNOME Control Center, which promises to make it easier for users to install new firmware versions for their hardware.
Meet GNOME Firmware Updater, a new power user tool that would help you keep your hardware secure and up-to-date at all times by allowing you to more easily install new firmware updates that are available from the vendor. It comes as a GNOME Control Center panel and it's complimentary to the current fwupd functionality built into GNOME Software.
"GNOME Firmware Updater was designed in the style of a GNOME Control Center panel, and all the code is written in a way to make a port very simple indeed if that's what we actually want," said Richard Hughes. "At the moment it's a separate project and binary, as we're still prototyping the UI and working out what kind of UX we want from a power user tool."
GNOME Firmware Updater to be available as a Flatpak app
The even better news is that GNOME Firmware Updater will be available as a Flatpak app that users can install on their GNOME desktop environment from the Flathub repository. Not only that Flatpak will make installing GNOME Firmware Updater a lot easier for everyone, without worrying about dependencies, but it will also make it easier to update it when new releases are available.
At the moment of writing, the GNOME Firmware Updater tool is still in the works, but you can see the idea behind it in the screenshot gallery below, courtesy of Richard Hughes. There's no telling when the final release will be available, but those interesting in testing the pre-release version and contributing code to it can download the source code right now from GitLab.
