• Slept badly, up late, catch up with Dave. Prepared TTT slides on making patches easy to review with Szymon & gave that.
• Lunch, synched with Andras to unwind some horror service authentication issue. Collected car from MOT/service in Bury with J.
• Interview, dinner, interview prep with M.
• Unclear whether to be encouraged or disappointed to have a new SpaceX association from a bogus profile on Linked-In, apparently we're the obvious choice of COOL-kid to associate with:
  
  I'd never considered to check the staff for bogus employees before, I wonder how many companies do that; kudos to Darshan for the catch.

It’s Friday, so it’s time to provide an update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation over the past week. Here’s my summary of the main activities and events, covering what both Board and staff members have been up to.

GNOME.Asia

I mentioned GNOME.Asia 2025 in my last post, but I’ll mention it again since it’s only a month until the event in Tokyo, which is being co-hosted with LibreOffice Asia .

As you’d expect, there is a lot of activity happening as GNOME.Asia 2025 approaches. Kristi has been busy with a plethora of organisational tasks, including scheduling, printing, planning for the day trip, and more.

Travel has also been a focus this week. The Travel Committee has approved sponsorship for a number of attendees, and we have moved on to providing assistance to those who need documentation for visas.

Finally, registration is now open! There are two registration sites: one for in-person attendees , and one for remote attendees . If you plan on attending, please do take the time to register!

Transitions

This week was a big week for us, with the announcement of Rosanna’s departure from the organisation. Internally transition arrangements have been in progress for a little while, with responsibilities being redistributed, accounts being handed over, and infrastucture that was physically managed by Rosanna being replaced (such as our mailing address and phone number). This work continued this week.

I’d like to thank Rosanna for her extremely helpful assistance during this transition. I’d also like to thank everyone who was pitched in this week, particularly around travel (thank you Kristi, Julian, Maria, Asmit!), as well as Cassidy and Arun for picking up tasks as they have arisen.

The Foundation is running smoothly despite our recent staffing change. Payments are being processed quickly and reliably, events and sysadmin work are happening as normal, and accounting tasks are being taken care of. I’m also confident that we’ll continue to work reliably and effectively as we move forward. There are improvements that we have planned which help with this, such as the streamlining of our financial systems and processes.

Ongoing tasks

It has become a common refrain in my updates that there is lots going on behind the scenes that doesn’t make it into these posts. This week I thought that I’d call some of those more routine activities out, so readers can get a sense of what those background tasks are.

It turns out that there is indeed quite a lot of them, so I’ve broken them down into sections.

Finances and accounting

It’s the beginning of the month, which is when most invoices tend to get submitted to us, so this week has involved a fair amount of payments processing. We use a mix of platforms for payments, and have a shared tracker for payments tasks. At the time of writing all invoices received since the beginning of the month have been paid, except for a couple of items where we needed additional information.

As mentioned in previous posts, we are in the process of deploying a set of improvements to our banking arrangements, and this continued this week. The changes are coming in bit by bit, and there are tasks for us to do at each step. It will be a number of weeks before the changes are completed.

Dawn who joined us last week has been doing research as part of her work to improve our finance systems. This has involved doing calls with team members and stakeholders, and is nearly complete.

Meetings!

Kristi booked the room for our regular pre-FOSDEM Advisory Board meeting, and I’ve invited representatives. Thanks to everyone who has sent an RSVP so far!

Next week we have another regular Board meeting scheduled, so there has been the routine work of preparing the agenda and sending out invitations.

Sysadmin work

Bart has been busy as usual, and it’s hard to capture everything he does. Recent activity includes improvements to donate.gnome.org, improvements to Flathub build pipelines, and working through a troublesome issue with the geolocation data used by GNOME apps.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Couple weeks ago Cloudflare announced it would be sponsoring some Open Source projects. Throwing money at pet projects of random techbros would hardly be news, but there was a certain vibe behind them and the people leading them.

In an unexpected turn of events, the millionaire receiving money from the billion-dollar company, thought it would be important to devote a whole blog post to random brokeboy from Athens that had an opinion on the Internet .

I was astonished to find the blog post. Now that I moved from normal stalkers to millionaire stalkers, is it a sign that I made it? Have I become such a menace? But more importantly: Who the hell even is this guy?

D-H-Who?

When I was painting with crayons in a deteriorating kindergarten somewhere in Greece, DHH, David Heinemeier Hansson , was busy with dumping Ruby on Rails in the world and becoming a niche tech celebrity. His street cred for releasing Ruby on Rails would later be replaced by his writing on remote work. Famously authoring “Remote: Office Not Required”, a book based on his own company, 37signals.

That cultural cache would go out the window in 2022 when he got in hot water with his own employees after an internal review process concluded that 37signals had been less than stellar when it came to handling race and diversity. Said review process culminated in a clash, where the employees were interested in further exploration of the topic, which DHH responded to them with “You are the person you are complaining about” (meaning: you, pointing out a problem, is the problem).

No politics at work

This incident lead the two founders of 37signals to the executive decision to forbid any kind of “ societal and political discussions ” inside the company, which, predictably, lead to a third of the company resigning in protest. This was a massive blow to 37signals. The company was famous for being extremely selective when hiring, as well as affording employees great benefits. Suddenly having a third of the workforce resign over disagreement with management sent a far more powerful message than anything they could have imagined.

It would become the starting point for the downwards and radicalizing spiral along with the extended and very public crashout DHH will be going through in the coming years.

Starting your own conference so you can never be banned from it

Subsequently, DHH was uninvited from keynoting at RailsConf on the account of everyone being grossed out about the handling of the matter and in solidarity with the community members along the employees that quit in protest.

That, in turn, would lead to the Rails Foundation starting Rails World. A new conference about Rails that 100%-swear-to-god was not just about DHH having his own conference where he can keynote and would never be banned.

In the following years DHH would go to explore and express all the spectrum of “down the alt-right pipeline” opinions, like:

• Woke is so bad that it made me a racist
• People call me racist, but I found a book telling me how nice I am
• Fat people are bad and should feel bad
• DEI is bad
• DEI is bad part 2: trigger the libs with git branchoveres
• Cheering for Affirmative action being banned in the USA
• The 80s were so great cause they were not woke
• Andrew Tate is awesome
• Therapy is so bad, that I shall platform transphobes
• Therapy is so annoying that I’d rather make an Arch distro instead
• Leave your work problems at therapy, instead of making it the problem of your boss (me)
• People not wanting kids are bad and Jordan Peterson nailed it
• Elon Musk and DOGE is awesome
• This private school is making my kids GAY
• London is full of “non-native Brits” and I am going to praise a race purity rally
• Words are not violence
• Words ARE violence, when they are against me

Omarchy

You either log off a hero, or you see yourself create another linux distribution, and having failed the first part, DHH has been pouring his energy into creating a new project. While letting everyone know how he much prefers that than going to therapy . Thus, Omarchy was born, a set of copy pasted Window Manager and Vim configs turned distro. One of the two projects that Cloudflare will be proudly funding shortly. The only possible option for the compositor would be Hyperland , and even though it’s Wayland (bad!), it’s one of the good-non-woke ones. In a similar tone, the project website would be featuring the tight integration of Omarchy with SuperGrok .

Rubygems

On a parallel track, the entire Ruby community more or less collapsed in the last two months. Long story short, is that one of the major Ruby Central sponsors, Sidekiq, pulled out the funding after DHH was invited to speak at RailsConf 2025. Shopify, where DHH sits in the boards of directors, was quick to save the day and match the lost funding. Coincidentally an (allegedly) takeover of key parts of the Ruby Infrastructure was carried out by Ruby Central and placed under the control of Shopify in the following weeks.

This story is ridiculous, and the entire ruby community is imploding following this. There’s an excellent write-up of the story so far here .

In a similar note, and at the same time, we also find DHH drooling over Off-brand Peter Thiel and calling for an Anduril takeover of the Nix community in order to purge all the wokes.

On Framework

At the same time, Framework had been promoting Omarchy in their social media accounts for a good while. And DHH in turn has been posting about how great Framework hardware is and how the Framework CEO is contributing to his Arch Linux reskin. On October 8th, Framework announced its sponsorhip of the Hyprland project, following 37signal doing the same thing couple weeks earlier . On the same day they made another post promoting Omarchy yet again. This caused a huge backlash and overall PR nightmare, with the apex being a forum thread with over 1700 comments so far.

The first reply in forum post, comes from Nirav, Framework’s CEO, with a very questionable choice of words:

We support open source software (and hardware), and partner with developers and maintainers across the ecosystem. We deliberately create a big tent, because we want open source software to win. We don’t partner based on individual’s or organization’s beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software.

I definitely understand that not everyone will agree with taking a big tent approach, but we want to be transparent that bringing in and enabling every organization and community that we can across the Linux ecosystem is a deliberate choice.

Mentioning twice a “big tent” as the official policy and response to complains about supporting Fascist and Racist shitheads, is nothing sort of digging a hole for yourself so deep it that it reemerges in another continent.

Later on, Nirav would mention that they were finalizing sponsorship of the GNOME Foundation (12k/year) and KDE e.V. (10k/year). In the linked page you can also find a listing of Rails World (DHH’s personal conference) for a one time payment of 24k dollars.

There has not been an update since, and at no point have they addressed their support and collaboration with DHH. Can’t lose the money cow and free twitter clout I guess.

While I would personally would like to see the donation be rejected, I am not involved with the ongoing discussion on the GNOME Foundation side nor the Foundation itself. What I can say is that myself and others from the GNOME OS team, were involved in initial discussions with Framework, about future collaborations and hardware support. GNOME OS, much like the GNOME Flatpak runtime, is very useful as a reference point in order to identify if a bug, in hardware or software, is distro-specific or not.

It’s been a month since the initial debacle with Framework. Regardless of what the GNOME Foundation plans on doing, the GNOME OS team certainly does not feel comfortable in further collaboration given how they have handled the situation so far. It’s sad because the people working there understand the issue, but this does not seem to be a trait shared by the management.

A software midlife crisis

During all this, DHH decided that his attention must be devoted to get into a mouth-off with a greek kid that called him a Nazi. Since this is not violence (see “ Words are not violence ” essay), he decided to respond in kind, by calling for violence against me (see “ Words are violence ” essay).

To anyone who knows a nerd or two over the age of 35, all of the above is unsurprising. This is not some grand heel turn, or some brainwashing that DHH suffered. This is straight up a midlife crisis turned fash speedrun.

Here’s a dude who barely had any time to confront the world before failing into an infinite money glitch in the form of Ruby on Rails, Jeff Bezos throwing him crazy money, Apple bundling his software as a highlighted feature, becoming a “new work” celebrity and Silicon Valley “Guru”. Is it any surprise that such a person later would find the most minuscule kind of opposition as an all-out attack on his self-image?

DHH has never had the “best” opinions on a range of things, and they have been dutifully documented by others, but neither have many other developers that are also ignorant of topics outside of software. Being insecure about your hairline and masculine aesthetic to the point of adopting the Charles Manson haircut to cover your balding is one thing. However, it is entirely different to become a drop-shipped version of Elon, tweeting all day and stopping only to write opinion pieces that come off as proving others wrong rather than original thoughts.

Case in point: DHH recently wrote about how “men who’d prefer to feel useful over being listened to”. The piece is unironically titled “ Building competency is better than therapy ”. It is an insane read, and I’ll speculate that it feels as if someone, who DHH can’t outright dismiss, suggested he goes to therapy. It’s a very “I’ll show you off in front of my audience” kind of text.

Add to that a three year speedrun decrying the “theocracy of DEI” and the seemingly authoritarian powers of “the wokes”, all coincidentally starting after he could not get over his employees disagreeing with him on racial sensitivities.

How can someone suggest his workers read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing and the BLM protests. While a couple of months later writing salivating blogposts after the EDL eugenics rally in England and giving the highest possible praise to Tommy Robinson ?

Can these people be redeemed?

It is certainly not going to help that niche celebrities, like DHH, still hold clout and financial power and are able to spout the worst possible takes without any backlash because of their position.

A bunch of Ruby developers recently started a petition to get DHH distanced from the community, and it didn’t go far before getting brigaded by the worst people you didn’t need to know existed. This of course was amplified to oblivion by DHH and a bunch of sycophants chasing the clout provided by being retweeted by DHH. It would shortly be followed by yet another “ I’m never wrong ” piece.

Is there any chance for these people, who are shielded by their well-paying jobs, their exclusively occupational media diet, and stimuli all happen to reinforce the default world view?

I think there is hope, but it demands more voices in tech spaces to speak up about how having empathy for others, or valuing diversity is not some grand conspiracy but rather enrichment to our lives and spaces. This comes hand in hand with firmly shutting down concern trolling and ridiculous “extreme centrist” takes where someone is expected to find common ground with others advocating for their extermination.

One could argue that the true spirit of FLOSS, which attracted much of the current midlife crisis developers in the first place, is about diversity and empathy for the varied circumstances and opinions that enriched our space.

Conclusion

I do not know if his heart is filled with hate or if he is incredibly lost, but it makes little difference since this is his output in the world.

David, when you read this I hope it will be a wake-up call. It’s not too late, you only need to go offline and let people help you. Stop the pathetic TemuElon speedrun and go take care of your kids. Drop the anti-woke culture wars and pick up a Ta-Nehisi Coates book again.

To everyone else: Push back against their vile and misanthropic rhetoric at every turn. Don’t let their poisonous roots fester into the ground. There is no place for their hate here. Don’t let them find comfort and spew their vomit in any public space.

Crush Fascism . Free Palestine.

• Sync with Dave, catch up with Tracie & Julie. Interview alongside Chris, catch up with an old friend, Lunch.
• Published the next strip around an project paying the complete maintenance bill:
  
• Sales team call, sync with Phlippe, discovered lots of older mail I'd somehow missed, processed it, more admin.

Yesterday I released Flatpak 1.17.0 . It is the first version of the unstable 1.17 series and the first release in 6 months. There are a few things which didn’t make it for this release, which is why I’m planning to do another unstable release rather soon, and then a stable release still this year.

Back at LAS this year I talked about the Future of Flatpak and I started with the grim situation the project found itself in: Flatpak was stagnant, the maintainers left the project and PRs didn’t get reviewed.

Some good news: things are a bit better now. I have taken over maintenance, Alex Larsson and Owen Taylor managed to set aside enough time to make this happen and Boudhayan Bhattcharya (bbhtt) and Adrian Vovk also got more involved. The backlog has been reduced considerably and new PRs get reviewed in a reasonable time frame.

I also listed a number of improvements that we had planned, and we made progress on most of them:

• It is now possible to define which Flatpak apps shall be pre-installed on a system, and Flatpak will automatically install and uninstall things accordingly. Our friends at Aurora and Bluefin already use this to ship core apps from Flathub on their bootc based systems (shout-out to Jorge Castro).
• The OCI support in Flatpak has been enhanced to support pre-installing from OCI images and remotes, which will be used in RHEL 10
• We merged the backwards-compatible permission system. This allows apps to use new, more restricting permissions, while not breaking compatibility when the app runs on older systems. Specifically access to input devices such as gamepads, and access to the USB portal can now be granted in this way. It will also help us to transition to PipeWire.
• We have up-to-date docs for libflatpak again

Besides the changes directly in Flatpak, there are a lot of other things happening around the wider ecosystem:

• bbhtt released a new version of flatpak-builder
• Enhanced License Compliance Tools for Flathub
• Adrian and I have made plans for a service which allows querying running app instances (systemd-appd). This provides a new way of authenticating Flatpak instances and is a prerequisite for nested sandboxing, PipeWire support, and getting rid of the D-Bus proxy. My previous blog post went into a few more details.
• Our friends at KDE have started looking into the XDG Intents spec, which will hopefully allow us to implement deep-linking, thumbnailing in Flatpak apps, and other interesting features
• Adrian made progress on the session save/restore Portal
• Some rather big refactoring work in the Portals frontend, and GDBus and libdex integration work which will reduce the complexity of asynchronous D-Bus

What I have also talked about at my LAS talk is the idea of a Flatpak-Next project. People got excited about this, but I feel like I have to make something very clear:

If we redid Flatpak now, it would not be significantly better than the current Flatpak! You could still not do nested sandboxing, you would still need a D-Bus proxy, you would still have a complex permission system, and so on.

Those problems require work outside of Flatpak, but have to integrate with Flatpak and Flatpak-Next in the future. Some of the things we will be doing include:

• Work on the systemd-appd concept
• Make varlink a feasible alternative to D-Bus
• D-Bus filtering in the D-Bus daemons
• Network sandboxing via pasta
• PipeWire policy for sandboxes
• New Portals

So if you’re excited about Flatpak-Next, help us to improve the Flatpak ecosystem and make Flatpak-Next more feasible!

• – from Farewell to Malta
  by Lord Byron

Friday was my last day at the GNOME Foundation. I was informed by the Board a couple weeks ago that my position has been eliminated due to budgetary shortfalls. Obviously, I am sad that the Board felt this decision was necessary. That being said, I wanted to write a little note to say goodbye and share some good memories.

It has been almost exactly twenty years since I started helping out at the GNOME Foundation. (My history with the GNOME Project is even older; I had code in GNOME 0.13 , released in March 1998.) Our first Executive Director had just left, and my husband was Board Treasurer at the time. He inherited a large pile of paperwork and an unhappy IRS. I volunteered to help him figure out how to put the pieces together and get our paperwork in order to get the Foundation back in good standing. After several months of this, the Board offered to pay me to keep it organized.

Early on, I used to joke that my title should have been “General Dogsbody” as I often needed to help cover all the little things that needed doing. Over time, my responsibilities within the Foundation grew, but the sentiment remained. I was often responsible for making sure everything that needed doing was done, while putting in many of the processes and procedures Foundation uses to keep running.

People often under-estimate how much hard work it is to keep an international non-profit like the GNOME Foundation going. There is a ton of minutia to be dealt with from ever-changing regulations, requirements, and community needs. Even simple-sounding things like paying people is surprisingly hard the moment it crosses borders. It requires dealing with different payment systems, bank rules, currencies, export regulations, and tax regimes. However, it is a necessary quagmire we have to navigate as it is a crucial tool to further the Foundation’s mission.

Working a GNOME booth

Over time, I have filled a multitude of different roles and positions (and had four different official titles doing so). I am proud of all the things I have done.

• I have been the assistant to six different Executive Directors helping them onboard as they’ve started. I’ve been the bookkeeper, accounts receivable, and accounts payable — keeping our books in order, making sure people are paid, and tracking down funds. I’ve been Vice Treasurer helping put together our budgets, and created the financial slides for the Treasurer, Board, and AGM. I spent countless nights for almost a decade keeping our accounts updated in GnuCash. And every year for the past nineteen years I was responsible for making sure our taxes are done and 990 filed to keep our non-profit status secure.
  As someone who has always been deeply entrenched in GNOME’s finances, I have always been a responsible steward, looking for ways to spend money more prudently while enforcing budgets.
• When the Foundation expanded after the Endless Grants, I had to help make the Foundation scale. I have done the jobs of Human Resources, Recruiter, Benefits coordinator, and managed the staff. I made sure the Board, Foundation, and staff are insured, and take their legally required training. I have also had to make sure people and contractors are paid and with all the legal formalities taken care of in all the different countries we operate in , so they only have to concern themselves with supporting GNOME’s mission.
• I have had to be the travel coordinator buying tickets for people (and approving community travel). I have also done the jobs of Project Manager, Project Liaison to all our fiscally sponsored projects and subprojects, Shipping, and Receiving. I have been to countless conferences and tradeshows, giving talks and working booths. I have enjoyed meeting so many users and contributors at these events. I even spent many a weekend at the post-office filling out customs forms and shipping out mouse pads, mugs, and t-shirts to donors (back when we tried to do that in-house.) I tended the Foundation mailbox, logging all the checks we get from our donors and schlepping them to the bank.
• I have served on five GNOME committees providing stability and continuity as volunteers came and went (Travel, Finance, Engagement, Executive, and Code of Conduct). I was on the team that created GNOME’s Code of Conduct, spending countless hours working with community members to help craft the final draft. I am particularly proud of this work, and I believe it has had a positive impact on our community.
• Over the past year, I have also focused on providing what stability I could to the staff and Foundation, getting us through our second financial review, and started preparing for our first audit planned for next March.

This was all while doing my best to hold to GNOME’s principles, vision, and commitment to free software.

But it is the great people within this community that kept me loyally working with y’all year after year, and the appreciation of the amazing project y’all create that matters. I am grateful to the many community members who volunteer their time so selflessly through the years. Old-timers like Sri and Federico that have been on this journey with me since the very beginning. Other folks that I met through the years like Matthias, Christian, Meg, PTomato, and German. And Marina, who we all still miss. So many newcomers that add enthusiasm into the community like Deepesha, Michael, and Aaditya. So many Board members. There have been so many more names I could mention that I apologize if your name isn’t listed. Please know that I am grateful for what everyone has brought into the community. I have truly been blessed to know you all.

I am also grateful for the folks on staff that have made GNOME such a wonderful place to work through the years. Our former Executive Directors Stormy, Karen, Neil, Holly, and Richard, all of whom have taught me so much. Other staff members that have come and gone through the years, such as Andrea (who is still volunteering), Molly, Caroline, Emmanuele, and Melissa. And, of course, the current staff of Anisa, Bart, and Kristi, in whose hands I know the Foundation will keep thriving.

As I said, my job has always been to make sure things go as smoothly as possible. In my mind, what I do should quiet any waves so that the waves the Foundation makes go into providing the best programming we can — which is why a moment from GUADEC 2015 still pops up in my head.

Picture this: we are all in Gothenburg, Sweden, in line registering for GUADEC. We start chatting in line as it was long. I introduce myself to the person behind me and he sputters, “Oh! You’re important!” That threw me for a loop. I had never seen myself that way. My intention has always been to make things work seamlessly for our community members behind the scenes, but it was always extremely gratifying to hear from folks who have been touched by my efforts.

GNOME things still to be transferred to the Board. Suitcase in front is full of items for staffing a GNOME Booth.

What’s next for me? I have not had the time to figure this out yet as I have been spending my time transferring what I can to the Board. First things first; I need to figure out how to write a resumé again. I would love to continue working in the nonprofit space, and obviously have a love of free software. But I am open to exploring new ideas. If anyone has any thoughts or opportunities, I would love to hear them!

This is not adieu; my heart will always be with GNOME. I still have my seat on the Code of Conduct committee and, while I plan on taking a month or so away to figure things out, do plan on returning to do my bit in keeping GNOME a safe place.

If you’d like to drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you. Unfortunately the Board has to keep my current GNOME email address for a few months for the transfer, but I can be reached at <rosanna at gnome> for my personal mail. (Thanks, Bart!)

Best of luck to the Foundation.

For over 20 years, Rosanna Yuen – aka zana – has been a key member of the GNOME Foundation team. I am writing this post to share the news that, as of last week, she is no longer working for us. We cannot emphasise enough how grateful we are for everything that Rosanna has done for the GNOME Foundation over the years, both as a volunteer and an employee, and we want to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate her for her accomplishments at the GNOME Foundation.

In the rest of this post I want to share some details about Rosanna’s career at the GNOME Foundation, as a way of celebrating her contributions and reiterating our gratitude for everything she has done for us.

Rosanna was a GNOME contributor before she started with the GNOME Foundation, as a hacker on the card games in Aisleriot. Way back in 2005, the organization was in a perilous situation after the departure of its first Executive Director, and had no employees. Rosanna stepped in as a volunteer to help keep the organization afloat. Following her intervention as a volunteer, she was taken on as a temporary contractor, and then became a part-time employee. Around four years later, in 2010, she went full time.

It is no exaggeration to say that Rosanna saved the organization from a state of collapse during those early years. Since then, her roles and duties have been diverse. Aside from a broad range of accounting, finance, and administrative tasks, Rosanna has helped with travel and visas, running programs, and handling grant paperwork. There have also been many small but meaningful tasks that she has taken care of, such as mailing out thank you postcards to our donors, and going to the store each year during GUADEC to buy the “Pants of Thanks”.

For a long time, Rosanna participated in Board meetings, to address any questions about the Foundation’s operations. And for many years, as the Foundation’s only employee, she performed those operations herself. In more recent years, the Foundation hired additional staff, and Rosanna took on a management role alongside her other duties, providing mentorship and guidance for new staff members as they joined. One of her defining qualities has been the care and support that she has shown towards these colleagues.

Rosanna had many significant achievements during her time with the GNOME Foundation, and it is impossible to list all of them in this post. However, some of those achievements deserve special mention. They include ensuring that we have maintained our charitable status over the past 20 years, presenting finance reports to both the Board and the membership at our AGMs, playing a key role in establishing GNOME’s first Code of Conduct (and serving on the Code of Conduct Committee since its inception), running the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (as it was known then) for a period, managing transitions between multiple banks and accounting platforms, and ensuring the smooth running of the organization over the past 20 years, including filing taxes, payment of bills and staff, payments for contractors, and much more.

The decision to eliminate Rosanna’s position was made by the Board as part of approving the GNOME Foundation budget for October 2025 to September 2026. The Board felt that this difficult decision was the right one for the Foundation, and we will be providing details about our plans in future communications. For now, we want to offer Rosanna our deepest thanks and best wishes for the future.

Thank you, zana.

Last week, as I was writing my trip report about the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit , I found myself going on a tangent about the program in our community, so I decided to split the content off into a couple of posts. In this post, I want to elaborate a bit on our goal with the program and how intern selection helps us with that.

I have long been saying that GSoC is not a “pay-for-code” program for GNOME. It is an opportunity to bring new contributors to our community, improve our projects, and sustain our development model.

Mentoring is hard and time consuming. GNOME Developers heroically dedicate hours of their weeks to helping new people learn how to contribute.

Our goal with GSoC is to attract contributors that want to become GNOME Developers. We want contributors that will spend time helping others learn and keep the torch going.

Merge-requests are very important, but so are the abilities to articulate ideas, hold healthy discussions, and build consensus among other contributors.

For years, the project proposal was the main deciding factor for a contributor to get an internship with GNOME. That isn’t working anymore, especially in an era of AI-generated proposals. We need to up our game and dig deeper to find the right contributors.

This might even mean asking for fewer internship slots. I believe that if we select a smaller group of people with the right motivations, we can give them the focused attention and support to continue their involvement long after the internship is completed.

My suggestion for improving the intern selection process is to focus on three factors:

• History of Contributions in gitlab.gnome.org : applicants should solve a few ~Newcomers issues, report bugs, and/or participate in discussions. This gives us an idea of how they perform in the contributing process as a whole.
• Project Proposal : a document describing the project’s goals and detailing how the contributors plans to tackle the project. Containing some reasonable time estimates.
• An interview : a 10 or 15 minutes call where admins and mentors can ask applicants a few questions about their Project Proposal and their History of Contributions .

The final decision to select an intern should be a consideration of how the applicant performed across these aspects.

Contributor selection is super important, and we must continue improving our process. This is about investing in the long-term health and sustainability of our project by finding and nurturing its future developers.

If you want to find more about GSoC with GNOME, visit gsoc.gnome.org

Red Hat

In October I celebrated 10 years at Red Hat. I don’t think I ever worked somewhere for more than a few years before that. Considering I started working professionally in tech after I barely escaped high school, that’s nearly half of my career.

It is also a reminder to reflect on the people who helped me get there. All the people on IRC that helped me learn programming in the early days of #gtk and #gnome-hackers IRC channels. And Miguel specifically for all the random demo code he would send my way to read how something could be done.

I know I’m one of the lucky ones that was able to do this without a formal education. I don’t necessarily recommend that but it has its benefits too.

Ptyxis

• Look into what app-id is used on Ubuntu to help users who can’t figure out where to put custom palettes. To make this a bit easier make sure we always have APP_ID in the troubleshooting data. Turned out to be missing [Light] section in their custom .palette.

  I can’t help but lament that this would be less of an issue if the org.gnome.* namespace where more allowed for people who are Foundation members. I’m both informed on why it is like this (a single situation that occurred by a former community member) and also disagree with the direction that was taken as a result of that.

• Look into diacritics issue for input. Usually this ends up being a system configuration issue. There is an oddity about this one in that changing focus and coming back fixes it. Also using ibus directly instead of the wayland text protocol fixes it. Neither of these are ideal so it may have something to do with state tracking either in the GTK Wayland backend or in Mutter.

  Thankfully the great Carlos Garnacho is helping us track it down.

• Look into why Silverblue has some users not seeing their containers which appear to be toolbox/podman related.

  Installed F43 Silverblue beta on my old testing laptop. Turns out I had an overzealous filter for the containers list. If you had more than one you’d be fine. This only affected 49 since that is the first release that gained support for the search filter box in the popover that otherwise looks like a GtkPopoverMenu .

  Made a release to get the fix out to F43 users quickly.

  Quickly I want to mention a feature that keyboard navigators will love. If you type Alt+comma the containers dialog will be displayed. If you hit Return you’ll land in the default host system (aka “My Computer”). If you type a few characters and hit Return you’ll land on the first container/profile that matches your keyword search.

Foundry

• New API to simplify navigating directory listings since you may want “..” in certain contexts (like Builder’s directory page).

• Add a FoundryFileSearchReplacement API to coordinate with the FoundryFileSearchMatch API. This makes it easy to do replacements based on search results in a manner like we do in GNOME Builder where you can tick on/off + replacement string w/ back-references. Of course to test this infrastructure I added a --replace= option to foundry grep so I can refactor quickly from Ptyxis.

• Write documentation for most of libfoundry exposed classes.

• Fix string array output for --format=json and improve it for regular text output.

• Fix grep plugin to add multiple matches on a single line as separate matches in the result set. This fixes search/replace to handle all matches in a file.

• New Terminal Intent for opening terminals within the application such as Builder. Add a TerminalService for exposing actions to the intent system to applications easily.

• Setup using intents for search results because it will allow us to abstract things like “activate action”, “open file”, “spawn terminal”, “browse to symbol”, “read documentation”, etc.

• Iteration on panel bar to try to give us a bit better interaction with the panel machinery in libfoundry-adw applications.

• Improve fallback search when there is not a VCS available to accelerate index building. (We use git file listing which is almost instantaneous to build our initial fuzzy search index instead of trying to iterate the file tree).

• Start on documentation bridge so doc search can show up in the regular search dialog.

• Host SDK gained support for running processes through a systemd-run with scope/unit like Ptyxis does for new tabs (when systemd-run is discovered on the host). This just helps identify things easier.

• Implement the whole PanelWidget::presented() machinery from libpanel into libfoundry-adw so that we can have Workspaces but also still be able to delay certain panel/page work until the user will actually see the widget. For example, the test suite panel needs to advance the build pipeline far enough to get introspection data which you don’t want to do unnecessarily.

• Add a new way to track current phase of a build pipeline. It is now dynamically calculated based on the maximum of the stages which have :completed set to true (so log as others in the same phase have the same value).

• Add new :eol property to FoundryDocumentationBundle so we can pass that information from SDKs into Manuals

• Build system updates so that we still have more control over feature flags for compiling in/out what you need in Foundry. This is quite a burden for sure, but it allows more flexibility in where Foundry can be used. For example, Manuals doesn’t need the text subsystem or Git for example.

Builder

• Trying a new design for various types of listings in the revamp. Directory listings, diagnostics listings, log panel, file search results, unit test panel, test output, etc.

• Copied how I did shortcuts in Ptyxis for the revamp because it works a lot nicer from a configuration standpoint and visibility. It also makes it much easier to bind from .ui files into controllers as well as update GMenu with appropriate shortcuts.

• Use g_file_trash() instead of delete when removing configurations.

GLib

• Pull in a year old patch from Ulrich Drepper into a MR that can be merged to make g_filename_from_uri() handle some valid hostnames according to RFC 1123.

• Extend the above patch to also support . later in labels so some questionable hostname like dev-ubu-25.10 in Ptyxis #490 work.

Manuals

• Show EOL information in documentation bundle installation dialog.

• Allow showing/hiding EOL documentation bundles.

Releases

• libpanel

• Foundry

• Builder

• D-Spy

• Manuals

• Gom