Fractal

Fractal is a Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust. Its interface is optimized for collaboration in large groups, such as free software projects.

Work in Progress

We already talked several times in the past about rewriting the application, but for different reasons we didn't do it. Now that the matrix-rust-sdk exists, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for us, we have a good starting point to build Fractal without the need to implement every single feature from the Matrix API. Finally with the release of GTK4 we would need to rework most of Fractal's code anyways. Therefore, it just makes sense to start over and build Fractal with all the features (e.g end-to-end encryption) we have in mind.

A year ago we started working on rewriting Fractal from scratch using GTK4 and the matrix-rust-sdk. This effort was called Fractal Next.

Fractal Next now replaced our previous codebase, and has become the new nightly version. It isn't yet ready for a release and you can follow along our progress towards it by looking at the Fractal v5 (Fractal-next) milestone.

Installation instructions

Stable version

The current stable version is 4.4.0 (released August 2020).

Flatpak is the recommended installation method. Until our next iteration is ready, you can get the official Fractal Flatpak on Flathub.

Development version

If you want to try Fractal Next without building it yourself, it is available as a nightly Flatpak in the gnome-nightly repo.

# Add Flathub-beta and the gnome-nightly repo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo

# Install the nightly build
flatpak install --user gnome-nightly org.gnome.Fractal.Devel

Build Instructions

Minimum Rust version

To build Fractal, Rust 1.60 is required. For development, you'll need to install the nightly toolchain to be able to run our pre-commit hook that validates the formatting and lints the Rust code.

Flatpak

Flatpak is the recommended way of building and installing Fractal.

First you need to make sure you have the GNOME SDK and Rust toolchain installed.

# Add Flathub-beta and the gnome-nightly repo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo

# Install the gnome-nightly Sdk and Platform runtime
flatpak install --user gnome-nightly org.gnome.Sdk//master org.gnome.Platform//master

# Install the required rust-stable extension from Flathub-beta
flatpak install --user flathub-beta org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//22.08beta

# Install the required llvm extension from Flathub-beta
flatpak install --user flathub-beta org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm14//22.08beta

ℹ️ The instructions below will build the same binary as the one available on the GNOME nightly repo. This is an optimised build so it can take a few minutes. If you're building Fractal for development, use the org.gnome.Fractal.Hack.json manifest instead.

Move inside the build-aux folder and then build and install the app:

cd build-aux
flatpak-builder --user --install app org.gnome.Fractal.Devel.json

Fractal Next can then be entirely removed from your system with:

flatpak remove --delete-data org.gnome.Fractal.Devel

GNU/Linux

If you decide to ignore our recommendation and build on your host system, outside of Flatpak, you will need Meson and Ninja (as well as Rust and Cargo).

meson . _build --prefix=/usr/local
ninja -C _build
sudo ninja -C _build install

Translations

Fractal is translated by the GNOME translation team on Damned lies.

Find your language in the list on the Fractal module page on Damned lies.

Password Storage

Fractal uses Secret Service to store the password so you should have something providing that service on your system. If you're using GNOME or KDE this should work for you out of the box with gnome-keyring or ksecretservice.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Does Fractal have encryption support? Will it ever?

Yes, the current development version (main branch) has encryption support using Cross-Signing. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/issues/717 for more info on the state of encryption.

• Can I run Fractal with the window closed?

Currently Fractal does not support this. Fractal is a GNOME application, and accordingly adheres GNOME guidelines and paradigms. This will be revisited if or when GNOME gets a "Do Not Disturb" feature.

The origin of Fractal

The development version is a complete rewrite of Fractal built on top of the matrix-rust-sdk using GTK4.

The previous version of Fractal was using GTK3 and its own backend to talk to a matrix homeserver, the code can be found in the legacy branch.

Initial versions were based on Fest https://github.com/fest-im/fest, formerly called ruma-gtk. In the origins of the project it was called guillotine, based on French revolution, in relation with the Riot client name, but it's a negative name so we decide to change for a math one.

The name Fractal was proposed by Regina Bíró.

Code of Conduct

Fractal follows the official GNOME Foundation code of conduct. You can read it here.