It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post about my work on GNOME Design and Community Management as part of my Sovereign Tech Fellowship. As usual, I want to share some of the most interesting developments.
Passkey PortalPasskeys are an easy and safe way to sign in, and can replace passwords. They’re tied to the website that issued them, so they can’t be phished. Hackers can’t steal them from a website because its servers don’t store your private key. You can learn more about passkeys and how they work at whatarepasskeys.info.
People have been working to bring passkey support to Linux for several years, and we’re getting closer to making it available to users. Just today, the experimental credentials portal was merged into xdg-desktop-portal. To support its implementation in GNOME, I’ve spent a lot of time researching and refining the design of the credentials portal. Below is an excerpt from the credentials portal mockup. Take a look at the full mockup in the OS mockups repository for all the user interaction flows.
Some details of the credentials portal mockup showing the passkey creation LibadwaitaIn my last blog post, I wrote about standardizing scale rows in libadwaita and mentioned that ActionRow would likely get a generic bottom child widget to support the change. This has now landed as the ActionRow:body property, and the calendar app Era already uses it to implement its participants row.
Screenshot of the calendar app Era with a participants row based using the new ActionRow:body propertyThe new scale style has also already landed in the upcoming libadwaita version.
Screenshot of the new scale style with pill shaped knob OtherIf you’ve read this blog before, you may have noticed that the font has changed. Inter has been installed on GNOME’s WordPress instance, so community members can now use it on their personal GNOME blogs to keep their typography consistent with GNOME’s web standards.
As usual, I’ve reviewed design changes across various projects and answered questions on Matrix and in issue threads. GNOME Circle reviews are also progressing well, and I’ll write more about them as the changes land.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment on this blog or reach out to me on Mastodon or Matrix.
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In the first "The Matrix" movie we have the famous scene of Neo just connected to the computer and opening his eyes and saying "I know kung fu". Something that was really cool in early 2000 sounds like a dystopia to me nowadays.
I don't want to "know kung fu", I want to practice Kung Fu! So I prefer "The Karate Kid" way:
First learn stand, then learn fly. Nature rule, Daniel-san, not mine.
And talking about movies, there are a lot of movies that shows the Hero's journey structure. And it's not relevant if Daniel-san win the last fight or if Rocky defeats Apollo, because the important part of the story is the journey, is the hero starting the adventure and how the path changes him.
And this exact principle applies to everything in live, everyone knows that shortcuts doesn't have value. You can win, you can be faster, stronger, bigger, but you are missing the point, you are missing that "journey before destination" is always true for any Radiant Knight.
In The Matrix the hero's journey is not related to the Kung Fu, and that was just some cool way of introducing the action, the learning is in a different path because in other case we won't have any movie.
Neo doesn't care about Kung Fu, it's just something nice to fight the Agent Smith (What an irony). Daniel-san want's to learn to fight to defend himself, but at the end, fighting is not important, at the end he actually learns karate, and that changes him, and Miyagi and Daniel care about karate.
Gen AI "externalizes" the journey, and it's very tempting to take the shortcut and go directly to get the trophy. But doing that we are removing all the value from the output, we are not learning, we are not doing the journey and we don't change at the end, so actually, using Gen AI is like a waste of time.
No one cares... About somethingI've been thinking lately about why people uses AI, because even with all the advertisement and pressure I sincerely do not see any value in using gen AI, I don't need this technology and the only outcome that I'm seeing today is that's destroying everything that I loved or cared about.
But going to the point, if there are so many people using and promoting this, maybe they see some value and thinking about it and just talking with different kind of people I'm starting to see a trend. Most of the people are okay with the usage of AI for anything that they don't care, and of course, they are against the usage in anything that they consider important, everything where they see value.
Designers will say that the AI is generating aberrant images, and stealing the work of others, ignoring copyright and attribution and depreciating the quality, but they will be okay to use it to generate text, translate, write code, etc.
Writers will say that any text generated with AI is poorly written, but they won't see any problem in using a gen AI image for their blog post.
Musicians will be disgusted by the AI generated music, but maybe they don't see any problem playing a vibe-coded video game.
Programmers...
Okay, maybe not everyone follows this pattern, or maybe that's exactly what's happening. Maybe some devs don't care about coding but care about reviewing, others don't care about testing but care about coding, and others don't care at all and vibe-code everything.
I don't see any value in any gen AI usage because I usually care about the output, but also about the process, and the how and why is, most of the times, more relevant than the final outcome.
That's why I try to use only free software, and I'm not using Windows or Mac, that's why sometimes I choose to use a tool just because it's written in python and not in java.
So to me, the quality of code is not more important than the license, it's not more important than technology used, and of course it's not more important than who and why.
Because I care... And you should care too!I've a "Software Engineer" university degree. But the final paper has no value. What's important to me at the end is that I started that career because my brother introduces me to debian and free software in the 90's. What's important is my relation with peers, professors, my activity in the local Linux User Group, days studying, the failure and the success after understanding interesting math... I don't need an AI generated title, and I don't want people with the "Software Engineer" title, I just want more people to have the opportunity to experience the same growth path, the journey.
What's the value of music? It's just something to listen when you are working, to hide the sound of life that surround you? Anyone that had listen any musician in live sees the value, the difference. It doesn't matter that you can make "better" music and record and play without any mistake, but we value the live performance, because the music is not the important part, the important part is the musician and the listener, the communication. And it's not the same if you listen the exact same song from someone that just lost his father.
What's my job? It's just the code that I write? To me it's clear that's not, and shouldn't be. My job is to create software, I don't care if a gen AI can do that, other people can do that before I started to be able to do it, and I'm not asking others to do it for me.
Of course, not caring about something is natural, no one is interested in all the human activity and just delegate some parts to continue working on what's important to them. But after thinking about it, I can't just ignore it.
Now, when I need an image, that I don't care enough to create myself, I will care just a little to find someone who actually care and delegate to him instead to a big corp AI. When I need some text to read, I will look for someone who actually cares about the text. And, of course, when I need any software or application , that I don't care enough to create myself, I will look for some developer that actually care about the code and for sure I won't ask any gen AI.
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