Bonsai Promises to Make Syncing Gnome Devices Easier

If you’re a GNOME user with multiple devices, and have longed for the day when those devices could easily be synced with one another, that wish may be coming true. Red Hat developer Christian Hergert has started developing a project called Bonsai, which will serve as a sort of personal cloud for all of your GNOME-based devices.

On his blog, Hergert stated, “I want access to my files and application data on all my computing devices but I don’t want to store that data on other peoples computers.” This idea led Herget to create Bonsai. And although this tool is very much in the experimental phase (which means it’s not an official GNOME project), it is being hosted on Hergert’s GNOME Gitlab repository.

The gist of Bonsai is simple – a daemon and shared library for providing personal cloud-like services specifically to the GNOME desktop. The goal of the project is to include services for the likes of:

• File storage
• Mail
• Calendar
• Todo/Checklist/Notes
• Photo Albums
• Music/Podcasts/Audiobooks/Radio
• Videos
• Search
• Backup
• System migration
• VPN

At the moment there is no telling if Bonsai will become an official GNOME application/service, but considering this fills a much-needed hole in the Linux desktop landscape, it’s a safe bet that it (or something similar) will become a reality in the near future.

Original announcement.