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I’m currently serving as a member of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, and am also a member of the Foundation’s Executive Committee. The last major GNOME Foundation update was back in October 2024, when we announced our budget for the current financial year, along with associated staffing changes. There have been some communications since then, particularly around events strategy and board membership changes, but it’s been a while since we provided a more complete general update.

This update is intended to fill that gap, with a summary of the GNOME Foundation’s activities over the past six months or so. You will hopefully see that, while the Foundation is currently operating under some challenging circumstances, we have been active in some significant areas, as well as keeping on top of essential tasks.

Board of Directors

The Board of Directors has been busy with its regular duties over the past six months. We continue to have regular monthly meetings, and have been dealing with high-level topics including ED hiring, finances, committee memberships, and more.

There have been a few membership changes on the board. We had an empty seat at the beginning of the board year, which we appointed Philip Chimento to fill. Philip is a previous board member with a lot of experience, and so was able to easily pick up the reins. We are very grateful to him for helping out.

In January, Michael Downey resigned from the board, and recently we filled his empty seat by appointing Cassidy Blaede. Members of the community will already be familiar with Cassidy’s contributions, and I think we can all agree that he will be a fantastic director.

Both of these seats are due for re-election in the summer, so the appointments are relatively short-term.

Michael was previously serving as treasurer, a position which we have been unable to fill from the existing pool of directors. We are currently in the process of speaking to a couple of candidates who have expressed an interest in taking on the position.

Executive Director Hiring

Most readers will know that we lost our previous Executive Director, Holly Million, back in July 2024. We were extremely fortunate to be able to appoint Richard Littauer as interim ED shortly afterwards, who has did an incredible amount for the Foundation on a part time basis last year. Richard continues to serve as our official ED and has been extremely generous in continuing to provide assistance on a voluntary basis. However, since his availability is limited, finding a new permanent ED has been a major focus for us since Holly’s resignation. We advertised for candidates back in September 2024, and since then the ED search committee has been busy reviewing and interviewing candidates. Thanks to this work, we hope to be able to announce a new Executive Director very shortly.

We are immensely grateful to the members of the ED search committee for their contributions: Deb Nicholson, Jonathan Blandford, Julian Sparber, Julian Hofer, Rob McQueen, and Rosanna Yuen. We also owe a huge debt of thanks to Richard.

Programs

“Programs” is the term that gets used for the impactful activities undertaking by non-profits (contrasted with activities like fundraising which are intended to support those programs). The GNOME Foundation has a number of these programs, some of which are established responsibilities, while others are fixed-term projects.

Sovereign Tech Fund

The Foundation has been hosting the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund-ed development project which has been ongoing since 2023. The management of this work has been handled by the GNOME STF team, which has in recent times been managed by Tobias Bernard and Adrian Vovk. You can read their incredible report on this work, which was published only last week.

The Foundation’s role for this project is primarily as a fiscal host, which means that we are responsible for processing invoices and associated administration. Thibault Martin was working for us as a contractor to do much of this work. However, with STF ramping down, Thibault has passed his responsibilities on to other staff members. Many thanks for your efforts, Thibault!

While most of the STF funded work has now concluded, there is a small amount of remaining funding that is being used to keep one or two developers working.

Alongside the existing STF-funded program, we have also been working on a hosting agreement for a new STF proposal, which is being worked on by Adrian Vovk. This agreement is almost complete and we hope to be able to provide more details soon.

GIMP

The GNOME Foundation is the fiscal host for the GIMP project and this entails regular work for us, mostly around finances and payments. Recently we have been helping out with a grant program that the GIMP project has set up, allowing the GIMP project to make better use of the funds that the Foundation holds for them.

Digital Wellbeing

We are currently about three-quarters of the way through a two year development project focused on digital wellbeing and parental controls. This program has been funded by Endless and is being led by Philip Withnall. We have also been lucky to have assistance on the design side from Sam Hewitt. The new digital wellbeing features that arrived in GNOME 48 were a significant milestone for this project.

The Exec Committee has recently been doing some development planning with Philip for the final phase of this work, which we hope to include in GNOME 49.

Flathub

Flathub continues to be a significant area of interest for the GNOME Foundation. We are currently contracting Bart Piotrowski as the main Flathub sysadmin, thanks to ongoing generous support from Endless. Bart continues to enhance Flathub’s infrastructure as well as proving ongoing support for this hugely successful platform.

In December, we advertised for an additional short-term role to develop the Flathub organisation. Interviews for the role have been concluded and we have selected a candidate who will be starting work in the next few weeks, with the goal of getting the payments and fundraising systems online.

GNOME Project Support

General support for the GNOME project is a core part of the Foundation’s role, and is something which occupies a lot of the Foundation’s time. The activities in each of these areas deserve blog posts of their own, but here’s a quick summary:

• Infrastructure. We continue to support GNOME’s development infrastructure, primarily by paying for Bart’s work in this area. Plenty has been happening behind the scenes to keep our development systems working well. We are grateful for the past and ongoing support of Red Hat including Andrea Veri’s time and server hosting, as well as significant new support from AWS allowing us to move to a cloud-based infastructure.
• Travel. Unfortunately the budget for community travel has been limited this year due to the Foundation’s overall financial situation, but we continue to provide some funding, and GNOME Foundation staff have been working with the travel committee as we approach GUADEC.
• Events. Foundation staff continue to support our events. In December we had a successful GNOME.Asia in Bengaluru, India. Linux App Summit is happening next week in Tiriana, Albania, and preparations for GUADEC 2025 are ongoing. We additionally held a short community consultation around our events strategy back in October, and this is something that the board has had discussions about subsequently.
• Communications. Finally, despite reduced headcount, we continue to devote some staff time to operating GNOME’s social media accounts.

In addition to these ongoing areas of support, there have been additional one off support tasks which the Foundation has taken care of over the past six months. For example, we recently paid for the Google API keys used by Evolution Data Server to be certified.

Administration

Outside of programs, we have been busy with the usual background tasks that are necessary to keep the Foundation operating. That includes maintaining our books, filling in legal paperwork when it’s needed, keeping the board updated about the organisation’s finances, and talking to donors.

Conclusion

So much has been happening in the GNOME Foundation over the past six months, that it has been challenging to fit it all into a single post, and there are many items which I did not have the space to cover. Nevertheless, I hope that this summary provides a useful overview, and goes some way to showing how much has been going on behind the scenes. With no full-time ED and a reduced staff, it has been a challenging period for the Foundation. Nevertheless, I think we’ve managed to keep on top of our existing responsibilities and programs, and hopefully will have more capacity with the additional a new full-time Executive Director very soon.

It should be said that, since Richard reduced his hours at the end of 2024, much of the Foundation’s “executive” work above has fallen to a combination of existing staff and the Executive Committee. It is a large burden for a small team, and I think that it’s fair to say that the current setup is not easy to sustain, nor is it 100% reliable.

We are hopeful that appointing a new ED will help ease our resource pressures. However, we are also very interested in welcoming any additional volunteers who are willing to help. So, if participating in the kinds of activities that I’ve described appeals to you, please contact me. We can easily create new positions for those who think they might be able to have a role in the organisation, and would love to talk about what skills you might be able to bring.

Wikimedia Hackathon 2025.

This year I have again received a grant from the WMF to attend to the annual Wikimedia Hackathon, this year is in Istanbul. I’m very grateful to them.

Since 2024 I’m very interested in the Wikibase platform since we are using it at LaOficina and is a main topic for the DHwiki WG. I’m not going into details but, from the very beginning, my first thoughs of involvement in the hackathon are related with Wikibase. Specially the need of «productization» and reduce entry barriers for Wikibase adoption, at least in my personal experience. Lately I’ve been thinking in very specific goals I think could be done in the hackathon:

• T391815 Wikibase Request for Comment: essential minimalist ontology
• T391821 Wikibase Request for Comment: an inventory of Wikibase related artifacts
• T391826 Wikibase Request for Comment: Wikibase Suite full multimedia proof of concept configuration
• T391828 Wikibase Request for Comment: a method for portable wikibase gadgets

The point is, I can’t do this alone. I have beend working on most of these things for months, but still are finished. Many different skills needed, lack of experience on some of them, etc.

So, the goal of this post is to call for action other attendants at the hackathon to join to work on them. The most relevant required skills (from my lack of skills point of view) are about MediaWiki integration, configuration and programming. For T391828, the most important is to be familiar with MediaWiki gadgets and for T391815, some practical experience in setting up ontologies in Wikibase.

All the practical results will be offered to the Wikibase developers for their consideration.

If you are interested please reach me in Telegram or at your preference. I also would love to set up a Wikibase zone in the hacking space for people working with Wikibase, with these or other tasks.

So, I’ll see you soon in Istanbul o/

Hello, chat! I’m Revisto, and I want to share my journey to GNOME Circle and how I became a GNOME Foundation member. I’ll discuss my experiences and the development path of Drum Machine. This is the first part of the “Journey to GNOME Circle” series.

I love Free and Open Source communities, especially GNOME and GNOME Circle. I find contributing to open source communities far more rewarding than contributing to projects maintained by a single individual. If you find the right community, there are many experienced, generous, and humble people you can learn from. You can explore various projects maintained by the community, experience consistent quality, be surrounded by an amazing community, and even enjoy some perks!

I found the GNOME community to be one of the best in the FOSS industry. Why?

• There are lots of apps and projects you can contribute to, from GTK to Terminal to GNOME Shell itself.
• It has a welcoming community full of experienced people.
• GNOME looks fantastic, thanks to Jakub Steiner. The GNOME design is stunning. It has great documentation and handbooks for beginners, making it super beginner-friendly.
• Different ways to contribute, you can help with documentation, programming, design, translation, create new apps, and more.
• Membership perks.

GNOME Foundation Membership?!

The GNOME Foundation offers membership to its active contributors. Whether you’re an active translator, help with documentation, enhance GNOME’s appearance, or generally MAKE GNOME BETTER, you can apply for membership. Additionally, if your app gets into GNOME Circle, you qualify for membership.

What are the perks?

Here are some of the perks in summary. You can find complete information here.

• Email Alias (nickname@gnome.org): gnome.org email addresses are provided for all Foundation members. This address is an alias which can be used as a relay for sending and receiving emails.
• Your own blog at blogs.gnome.org: Foundation members are eligible to host their blog on blogs.gnome.org.
• Listing on Planet GNOME: Foundation members who have blogs can have them included on planet.gnome.org.
• Travel sponsorship for events: Foundation members are eligible for travel sponsorship to GNOME conferences and events.
• Nextcloud (cloud.gnome.org): GNOME hosts a Nextcloud instance at cloud.gnome.org. This provides a range of services, including file hosting, calendaring, and contact management.

These are useful and beneficial for your reputation and branding. I use my email alias for GNOME-related work at AlirezaSh@gnome.org, and have my blog at alirezash.gnome.org, and sync my Obsidian notes with Nextcloud on GNOME infrastructure. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my travel sponsorship as a speaker at events because I’m from Iran, and due to OFAC regulations, which is so unfair.

What’s GNOME Circle?

I’ve always had the idea of creating beautiful, useful apps for Linux. There were many apps I needed but couldn’t find a good version for Linux, and some apps I wished had better GUIs.

GNOME Circle is a collection of applications and libraries that extend the GNOME ecosystem.

“GNOME Circle champions the great software that is available for the GNOME platform. Not only do we showcase the best apps and libraries for GNOME, but we also support independent developers who are using GNOME technologies.”
— GNOME Circle

In GNOME, we have core apps like Terminal, GNOME Shell, Text Editor, etc., and we have GNOME Circle apps. These are apps that independent developers have created using GNOME technologies (GTK and Libadwaita), following the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, and meeting the app criteria. Once accepted, these apps become part of GNOME Circle.

GNOME Circle has lots of really cool apps that you should check out. It includes Curtail, an application to compress your images; Ear Tag, an audio file tags editor; Chess Clock, which provides time control for over-the-board chess games.

GNOME Circle is really cool, full of beautiful apps and creative developers.

Insert image of fun little stuff that looks like ideas here.

App Idea?

If GNOME Circle sounds interesting to you, or you like GNOME Foundation membership perks, or you appreciate the open-source community, or you want to create an app that fulfills your own needs, you should have an idea. What app do you want to develop? I believe we all have ideas. Personally, I really want a good VPN client for Linux (because of censorship in Iran, it’s vital), or a good-looking, user-friendly download manager, among other apps.

I highly recommend you check out other applications on GNOME Circle. There are lots of creative projects there that can inspire you. Some of my favorites:

• Wike: Search and read Wikipedia articles.
• Komikku: Discover and read manga & comics.
• Fretboard: Look up guitar chords.
• Ear Tag: Edit audio file tags.

I think it’s a good idea to check if your idea has already been implemented. You can check the apps in GNOME Circle and also check the apps that are being reviewed by the GNOME Circle Committee to become part of the circle soon: GNOME Circle Issues.

Although you can submit a new app with a similar idea to an existing app, I believe it would be better to bring new ideas to the circle or even contribute to existing circle apps that align with your idea.

On a side note, I really enjoy reading other people’s app requests and discussions here. I’ve been reading them to familiarize myself with the application acceptance process and understand the possible reasons an app might get rejected.

Insert image of an online drum machine here.

Since I’m a music producer (listen to my work here), I really like the idea of making music production in Linux easier. I had music-related ideas for my first app in the Circle: synthesizers, drum machines, and eventually a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). I started simple and went with Drum Machine. I looked at different online drum machines, such as drumbit.app and onemotion.com/drum-machine, then I started thinking about how I wanted my own drum machine to look like and I drew this (I know it doesn’t look good; I’m bad at drawing >-<).

Now I had motivation, an idea, and wanted to actually start making.
I’ll detail the development process and evolution of Drum Machine in the next post, so stay tuned!

You can find me here:

• Mastodon: @revisto@mastodon.social
• Blog: blogs.gnome.org/AlirezaSh
• GitHub: github.com/revisto
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/revisto
• Telegram (Personal): t.me/revisto
• Telegram (Tech Channel in Farsi): t.me/revistoTech

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to another month of rambling status reports. Not much in terms of technology this month, my work at Codethink is still focused on proprietary corporate infrastructure, and the weather is too nice to spend more time at a computer than necessary. Somehow I keep reading things and thinking about stuff though, and so you can read some of these thoughts and links below.

Is progress going backwards?

I’ve been listening to The Blindboy Podcast from the very beginning. You could call this a “cult podcast” since there isn’t a clear theme, the only constant is life, narrated by an eccentric Irish celebrity. I’m up to the episode “Julias Gulag” from January 2019, where Blindboy mentions a Gillette advert of that era which came out against toxic masculinity, very much a progressive video in which there wasn’t a single razor blade to speak of. And he said, roughly, “I like the message, and the production is excellent, but I always feel uneasy when this type of “woke” video is made by a huge brand because I don’t think the board of directors of Proctor & Gamble actually give a shit about social justice.”

This made me think of an excellent Guardian article I read last week, by Eugene Healey entitled “Marketing’s ‘woke’ rebrand has ultimately helped the far right”, in which he makes largely the same point, with six years worth of extra hindsight. Here are a few quotes but the whole thing is worth reading:

Social progress once came hand-in-hand with economic progress. Now, instead, social progress has been offered as a substitute for economic progress.

Through the rear window it’s easy to see that the backlash was inevitable: if progressive values could so easily be commodified as a tool for selling mayonnaise, why shouldn’t those values be treated with the same fickleness as condiment preferences?

The responsibility we bear now is undoing the lesson we inadvertently taught consumers over this era. Structural reform can’t be achieved through consumption choices – unfortunately, we’re all going to have to get dirt under our fingernails.

We are living through a lot of history at the moment and it can feel like our once progressive society is now going backwards. A lot of the progress we saw was an illusion anyway. The people who really hold power in the world weren’t really about to give anything up in the name of equality, and they still aren’t. World leaders were still taking private jets to conferences to talk about the climate crisis, and so on. The 1960s USA seemed like a place of progress, and then they went to war in Vietnam.

As Eugene Healey says towards the end of his piece, one positive change is that it’s now obvious who the bad guys are again. Dinold Tromp appears on TV every time I look at a TV, and he dresses like an actual supervillain. Mark Zuckerburg is trying to make his AI be more right-wing. Gillette is back to making adverts which are short videos of people shaving, because Gillette is a brand that manufactures razors and wants you to buy them. It is not a social justice movement!

The world goes in cycles, not straight lines. Each new generation of people has to ignore most of what we learn from teachers and parents, and figure everything out for ourselves the hard way, right?

For technologists, it’s been frustrating to spend the last decade telling people to be wary of Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, and being roundly ignored. They are experts in making convenient, zero cost products, and they are everywhere. Unless you’re an expert in technology or economics, then it wasn’t obvious what they have been working towards, which is the same thing it always was, the same that drove everything Microsoft did through the 1990s: accumulating more and more money and power.

You don’t get very far if you tell this story to some poor soul who just needs to make slides for a presentation, especially if your suggestion is that they try LibreOffice Impress instead.

When 2025 kicked off, CEOs of all those Big Tech companies attended the inauguration of Dinald Tromp and donated him millions of dollars, live on international news media. In the long run I suspect this moment will have pushed more people towards ethical technology than 20 years of campaigning about nonfree JavaScript.

Art, Artificial Intelligence and Idea Bankrupcy

Writing great code can be a form of artistic expression. Not all code is art, of course, just as an art gallery is not the only place you will find paint. But if you’re wondering why some people release groundbreaking software for free online, it might help to view it as an artistic pursuit. Anything remotely creative can be art.

I took a semi retirement from volunteer open source contributions back in October of last year, having got to a point where it was more project management than artistic endeavour. In an ideal world I’d have some time to investigate new ideas, for example in desktop search or automated GUI testing, and publish cool stuff online. But there are two blockers. One blocker is that I don’t have the time. And the other, is that the open web is now completely overrun with data scrapers, which somehow ruins the artistic side of publishing interesting new software for free.

We know that reckless data scraping by Amazon, Anthropic, Meta and Microsoft/OpenAI (those US tech billionaires again), plus their various equivalents in China, is causing huge problems for open source projects and other non-profits. It has led The Wikimedia Foundation to declare this month that “Our content is free, our infrastructure is not“. And Ars Technica also published a good summary of the situation.

Besides the bandwidth costs, there’s something uncomfortable about everything we publish online being immediately slurped into the next generation of large language model. If permissive software licenses lead to extractive behaviour, then AI crawlers are that on steroids. LLMs are incredibly effective for certain use cases, and one such use case is “copyright laundering machines”.

Software licensing was a key part of the discussion around ethical technology when I first discovered Linux in the late 1990s. There was a sense that if you wrote innovative code and published it under the GNU GPL, you were helping to fight the evils of Big Tech, as the big software firms wouldn’t legally be able to incorporate your innovation into their products without releasing their source code under the same license. That story is spelled out word-for-word in Richard Stallman’s article “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism”. I was never exactly a disciple of Richard Stallman, but I did like to release cool stuff under the GPL in the past, hoping that in a small way it’d work towards some sort of brighter future.

I was never blind to the limitations of the GPL. It requires an actual threat of enforcement to be effective, and historically only a few groups like the Software Freedom Conservancy actually do that difficult legal work. Another weakness in the overall story was this: if you have a big pile of cash, you can simply rewrite any innovative GPL code. (This is how we got Apple to pay for LLVM).

Long ago I read the book “Free as in Freedom”. It’s a surprisingly solid book which narrates Richard Stallman’s efforts to form a rebel alliance and fight what we know today as Big Tech, during which he founds the GNU Project and invents the GPL. It is only improved in version 2.0 where Stallman himself inserts pedantic corrections into Sam Williams’s original text such as “This cannot be a direct quote because I do not use fucking as an adverb”. (The book and the corrections predate him famously being cancelled in 2019). He later becomes frustrated at having spent a decade developing an innovative, freely available operating system, only for the media and the general public to give credit to Linus Torvalds.

Right now the AI industry is trying to destroy copyright law as we know it. This will have some interesting effects. The GPL depends on copyright law to be effective, so I can only see this as the end of the story for software licensing as a way to defend and ensure that the inventors of cool things get some credit and earn money. But let’s face it, the game was already up on that front.

Sustainable open source projects — meaning those where people actually get paid do all the work that is needed for the project to succeed — can exist and do exist. We need independent, open computing platforms like GNOME and KDE more than ever. I’m particularly inspired by KDE’s growing base of “supporting members” and successful fundraisers. So while this post might seem negative, I don’t see this as a moment of failure, only a moment of inflection and of change.

This rant probably needs a deeper message so I’m going to paraphrase Eugene Healey: “Structural reform can’t be achieved just by publishing code online”. The hard work and meaningful work is not writing the code but building a community who support what you’re doing.

My feeling about the new AI-infested web, more to the point, is that it spoils the artistic aspect of publishing your new project right away as open source. There’s something completely artless about training an AI on other people’s ideas and regenerating it in infinite variations. Perhaps this is why most AI companies all have logos that look like buttholes.

Visual artists and animators have seen DALL-E and Stable Diffusion tale their work and regurgitate it, devoid of meaning. Most recently it was the legendary Studio Ghibli who had their work shat on by Sam Altman. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself”, say the artists. At least Studio Ghibli is well-known enough to get some credit, unlike many artists whose work was coopted by OpenAI without permission.

Do you think the next generation of talented visual artists will publish their best work online, within reach of Microsoft/OpenAI’s crawlers?

And when the next Fabrice Bellard comes up with something revolutionary, like FFMPEG or QEMU were when they came out, will they decide to publish the source code for free?

Actually, Fabrice Bellard himself has done plenty of research around large language models, and you will notice that his recent projects do not come with source code…

With that in mind, I’m declaring bankruptcy on my collection of unfinished ideas and neat projects. My next blog post will be a dump of the things I never got time to implement and probably never will. Throw enough LLMs at the problem and we should have everything finished in no time. If you make the thing I want, and you’re not a complete bastard, then I will happily pay a subscription fee to use it.

I’m interested what you, one of the dozen readers of my blog, think about the future of “coding as art”. Is it still fun when there’s a machine learning from your code instead of a fellow programmer?

And if you don’t believe me that the world goes in cycles and not straight lines: take some time to go back to the origin story of Richard Stallman and the GPL itself. The story begins at the Massachusets Institute of Technology, in a computing lab that in the 1970s and 80s was at the cutting edge of research into… Artificial Intelligence.

Spring is in the air, the snow is finally melting away here in the cold north, and Keypunch is getting an update! Let’s walk through all the new features and improvements together.

Realistic Results

Up to now, Keypunch’s measurements of typing performance have been rather primitive. For speed, it has just compared the total number of typed characters, both correct and incorrect, to the test duration. Likewise, the “correctness” rate is nothing more than the share of correctly typed characters at the time of calculation. If you make a mistake and then correct it, it’s not taken into account at all.

These calculations are easy to understand and interpret, but also flawed and potentially misleading. The one for speed in particular has caused some pretty ridiculous result screens because of its uncritical counting. Needless to say, this is not ideal.

I’ve gone a little back and forth with myself on how to move forward, and ended up overhauling both of the calculations: For speed, Keypunch now counts how many correct characters there are at the end of the test, while the correctness rate has been replaced with real accuracy, based on all operations that have changed the typed text rather than just the final result.

An overview of the new result calculations

The new calculations come with their own trade-offs, such as the incentive to correct mistakes being slightly reduced. In general, however, I view them as a change for the better.

Frustration Relief

Learning to type is awfully hard. At least it was for me; sometimes it felt like I wasn’t even in control of my own fingers. This made me furious, and my number-one coping mechanism was to go berserk with my keyboard and mash random keys in frustration. As one might guess, this did not help me progress, and I probably should just have gone for a walk or something instead.

To safeguard the poor souls who come after me, I’m introducing something I call frustration relief. The concept is simple: If Keypunch detects that you’re randomly mashing your keyboard, it will cancel the test and provide a helpful piece of life advice.

Frustration relief in action

I can’t understate how much I wish I had something like this a couple of years ago.

Input Improvements

Being a text-centric app with multi-language support, Keypunch inevitably has to work with the many intricacies of digital text input. This includes the fact that the Unicode standard contains more than a dozen different space characters. For a while, Keypunch has supported entering regular spaces in the place of non-breaking ones, and now the same is possible the other way around too. Notably, this is a significant improvement for users of the francophone BÉPO keyboard layout.

New Languages

Keypunch’s international community has been hard at work lately, and I’m happy to report a solid upturn in language support. For text generation, these languages have been added:

• Catalan
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Greek
• Indonesian
• Slovak
• Persian

This brings the total language count up to 38! Does Keypunch support your language yet? If not, feel free to open a language request.

A preview of the extended language support

On the interface translation side, Keypunch has enrolled in GNOME’s common translation system, Damned Lies, allowing it to benefit from the coordinated and high-quality work of GNOME’s translation teams. Since the last update, Keypunch has been translated into these languages:

• Catalan
• British English
• Persian
• Finnish
• Indonesian
• Kabyle
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Chinese

Thanks to everyone who is helping make Keypunch speak their language!

Platform Progression

This Keypunch release is based on GNOME 48, which brings a bunch of external platform goodness to the app:

• The latest Adwaita styling
• Better adherence to the system font settings
• Improved performance
• An “Other Apps” section in the About dialog

The new “Other Apps” section in the About dialog

While not directly part of the runtime, Keypunch will also benefit a lot from the new Adwaita Fonts. It’s exciting to build on such a rapidly improving platform.

Additional Artwork

Apparently, some people are keeping Keypunch in their game libraries. If you’re one of them, I’ve made a couple of assets to make Keypunch integrate better visually with the rest of your collection. Enjoy!

Circle Inclusion

Keypunch is now part of GNOME Circle! I’m happy and grateful to have another app of mine accepted into the program. For full transparency, I’m part of the Circle Committee myself, but Keypunch has been independently reviewed by two other committee members, namely Tobias and Gregor. Thanks!

Final Thoughts

That’s it for this update. Initially, I was planning on just doing a platform/translation bump now and holding off the headline features for an even bigger update later on, but I decided that it’s better to ship what I have at the moment and let the rest wait for later. There’s still more on the roadmap, but I don’t want to spoil anything!

If you have questions or feedback, feel free to mention me on Mastodon or message me on Matrix.

Oh, and if you’d like to support my work, feel free to make a donation! I’d really appreciate that.

The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to share that registration for GUADEC 2025 is now open!

GUADEC is the largest annual gathering of GNOME developers, contributors, and community members. This year we welcome everyone to join us in the beautiful city of Brescia, Italy from July 24th to 29th or online! For those who cannot join us in person, we will live-stream the event so you can attend or present remotely.

To register, visit guadec.org and select whether you will attend in person or remotely.
In-person attendees will notice a slight change on their registration form. This year we’ve added a section for “Registration Type” and provided 4 options for ticket fees. These costs go directly towards supporting the conference and helping us build a better GUADEC experience.
We ask that in-person attendees select the option they are most comfortable with. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at guadec@gnome.org.

Register for In-Person Attendance
Register for Remote Attendance

The Call for Participation is ongoing but once are talks are selected you will find speaker details and a full schedule on guadec.org. We will also be adding more information about social events, accommodations, and activities throughout Brescia soon!

We are still looking for conference sponsors. If you or your company would like to become a GUADEC 2025 sponsor, please take a look at our sponsorship brochure and reach out to us at guadec@gnome.org.

To stay up-to-date on conference news, be sure to follow us on Mastodon @gnome@floss.social.

We look forward to seeing you in Brescia and online!

 After a long time of low-maintenance (as in me being out of the picture and doing mostly releases and some trivial/not-so-trivial-but-quick fixes here and there) period for GNOME-Calculator, it's time to reveal what's happening behind the scenes.

Long-story short, pretty late in the 48 cycle two contributors popped up to breathe some life into GNOME Calculator, so much, that I had a pretty hard time keeping track of the merge requests piling up. So most of the kudos for the below-mentioned features go to fcusr and Adrien Plazas, and I hope I will manage to list all of them, and it would be great to have folks using the Nightly Calculator (current development version from flatpak gnome-nightly repo)  to help spot issues/requests in time to be fixed for 49.

So now the features:

Conversion mode

Based on several user requests and the work of fcusr, conversion UI was moved to a separate "mode". Important thing to note here, that conversions using keyboard-only are still possible (e.g. typing 1 kg in g yields the r
esult) in any mode, Conversion view is just a UI/button/touch-friendly way of doing the conversions without typing, similarly to what we had previously in the advanced mode.

 

 UI cleanup, styling and touch improvements

Both Adrien and fcusr worked on simplifying the UI-related code, dropping old/unnecessary styling, tweaking the looks of buttons, improving the access to toggles/switches to make Calculator easier to use with functions grouped, styled in a meaningful way.

The interface was also "optimized" for smaller screens/touch devices, namely function buttons which up until now only entered the function name to save you some typing will work with some text selected to insert brackets around the selection and add the function.

New functions and constants

 For anyone needing them, new functions have been added:

• greatest common divisor ( e.g. using gcd (456;1584;40;60) yields 4 as a result)
• least common multiple ( e.g. using lcm (456;1584;40;60) yields 150480 as a result)
• combination (e.g. using ncr (9;5) yields 126 as a result)
• permutation (e.g. using npr (9;5) yields 15120 as a result)
• common constants are now available from the memory button (also used for accessing variables)
  

Favorite currencies 

As the list of available currencies for conversion is already huge, scrolling through the currency list for selecting currencies in case you have multiple ones you are used to convert between (given that the last currencies you used should be persisted) is harder, currencies can  be marked as Favorites using the preferences section for Favorite currencies, and the selected ones will appear on top of the currency selector.

GNOME exchange API

Given that we are occasionally having issues with the exchange rate providers (site not being available, site not accepting our user-agent) rendering Calculator currency conversions broken (or even worse, in some cases freezing Calculator completely) the decision was taken to host our own exchange rate API, and with the help of the folks in the GNOME Infrastructure team we have a GNOME exchange API, which will be used for exchange rate retrieval. 

The relevant project is available at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/xchgr8s.

For now, this is basically a static mirror of the providers used so far in Calculator (hence the URL change can be "backported" to any calculator version easily), which does fetch the exchange rates once a day from all providers, and commits them to the repository, from where it will be served via gitlab pages + GNOME reverse proxy + CDN.

This way we have control over the format we provide, we can do any processing on the exchange rates fetched from the external sources, and we can update the currency providers in GNOME Calculator however we want as long as they use one of the formats provided by the exchange-API, be it an existing format or a completely new one added to exchange API.

This was a first step towards fixing a 10-year old, GNOME bugzilla-reported bug still open, but I would say we're on the right track.

 That's all for now, keep up the good work.

Bit of the why

So often I come across the need to avoid my system to block forever, or until a process finishes, I can’t recall how did I came across systemd inhibit, but here’s my approach and a bit of motivation

Motivation

I noticed that the Gnome Settings, come with Rygel

After some fiddling (not much really), it starts directly once I login and I will be using it instead of a fully fledged plex or the like, I just want to stream some videos from time to time from my home pc over my ipad :D using VLC.

The Hack systemd-inhibit --who=foursixnine --why="maybe there be dragons" --mode block \ bash -c 'while $(systemctl --user is-active -q rygel.service); do sleep 1h; done'

One can also use waitpid and more.

Thank you for comming to my ted talk.