A lot of progress has been made since my last Digital Wellbeing update two months ago. That post covered the initial screen time limits feature, which was implemented in the Parental Controls app, Settings and GNOME Shell. There’s a screen recording in the post, created with the help of a custom GNOME OS image, in case you’re interested.

Finishing Screen Time Limits

After implementing the major framework for the rest of the code in GNOME Shell, we added the mechanism in the lock screen to prevent children from unlocking when the screen time limit is up. Parents are now also able to extend the session limit temporarily , so that the child can use the computer until the rest of the day.

Parental Controls Shield

Screen time limits can be set as either a daily limit or a bedtime. With the work that has recently landed, when the screen time limit has been exceeded, the session locks and the authentication action is hidden on the lock screen. Instead, a message is displayed explaining that the current session is limited and the child cannot login. An “Ignore” button is presented to allow the parents to temporarily lift the restrictions when needed.

Parental Controls shield on the lock screen, preventing the children from unlocking

Extending Screen Time

Clicking the “Ignore” button prompts the user for authentication from a user with administrative privileges. This allows parents to temporarily lift the screen time limit, so that the children may log in as normal until the rest of the day.

Authentication dialog allowing the parents to temporarily override the Screen Time restrictions

Showcase

Continuing the screen cast of the Shell functionality from the previous update, I’ve recorded the parental controls shield together, and showed the extending screen time functionality:

GNOME OS Image

You can also try the feature out for yourself, with the very same GNOME OS live image I’ve used in the recording, that you can either run in GNOME Boxes , or try on your hardware if you know what you’re doing

Conclusion

Now that the full Screen Time Limits functionality has been merged in GNOME Shell, this concludes my part in the Digital Wellbeing Contract. Here’s the summary of the work:

• We’ve redesigned the Parental Controls app and updated it to use modern GNOME technologies
• New features was added, such as Screen Time monitoring and setting limits: daily limit and bedtime schedule
• GNOME Settings gained Parental Controls integration, to helpfully inform the user about the existence of the limits
• We introduced the screen time limits in GNOME Shell, locking childrens’ sessions once they reach their limit. Children are then prevented from unlocking until the next day, unless parents extend their screen time

In the initial plan, we also covered web filtering, and the foundation of the feature has been introduced as well. However, integrating the functionality in the Parental Controls application has been postponed to a future endeavour.

I’d like to thank GNOME Foundation for giving me this opportunity, and Endless for sponsoring the work. Also kudos to my colleagues, Philip Withnall and Sam Hewitt, it’s been great to work with you and I’ve learned a lot (like the importance of wearing Christmas sweaters in work meetings!), and to Florian Müllner, Matthijs Velsink and Felipe Borges for very helpful reviews. I also want to thank Allan Day for organizing the work hours and meetings, and helping with my blog posts as well Until next project!

For those of you who are attending FOSDEM, we’re doing a GNOME OS hackfest and invite those of you who might be interested on our experiments on concepts as the ‘anti-distro’, eg an OS with no distro packaging that integrates GNOME desktop patterns directly.

The hackfest is from January 28th – January 29th. If you’re interested, feel free to respond on the comments. I don’t have an exact location yet.

We’ll likely have some kind of BigBlueButton set up so if you’re not available to come in-person you can join us remotely.

Agenda and attendees are linked here here.

There is likely a limited capacity so acceptance will be “first come, first served”.

See you there!

Welcome to my regular weekly update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. As usual, this post just covers highlights, and there are plenty of smaller and in progress items that haven’t been included.

Board meeting

The Board of Directors had a regular meeting this week. Topics on the agenda included:

• switching to a monthly rather than bi-monthly meeting schedule, which will give more time for preparation and follow-up
• creating an Audit Committee , which is a requirement for the upcoming audit
• performing a routine evaluation of how the organisation is being managed

According to our new schedule, the next meeting will be on 9th February.

New finance platform

As mentioned last week , we started using a new platform for payments processing at the beginning of the year. Overall the new system brings a lot of great features which will make our processes more reliable and integrated. However, as we adopt the tool we are having to deal with some ongoing setup tasks which mean that it is taking additional time in the short term.

GUADEC 2026 planning

Kristi has been extremely busy with GUADEC 2026 planning in recent weeks. She has been working closely with the local team to finalise arrangements for the venue and accommodation, as well as preparing the call for papers and sponsorship brochure.

If you or your organisation are interested in sponsoring this fantastic event, just reach out to me directly, or email guadec@gnome.org . We’d love to hear from you.

FOSDEM preparation

FOSDEM 2026 is happening over the weekend of 31st January and 1st February, and preparations for the event continue to be a focus. Maria has been organising the booth, and I have been arranging the details for the Advisory Board meeting which will happen on 30 January. Together we have also been hunting down a venue for a GNOME social event on the Saturday night.

Digital Wellbeing

This week the final two merge requests landed for the bedtime and screen time parental controls features. These features were implemented as part of our Digital Wellbeing program, and it’s great to see them come together in advance of the GNOME 50 release. More details can be found in gnome-shell!3980 and gnome-shell!3999 .

Many thanks to Ignacy for seeing this work through to completion!

Flathub

Among other things, Bart recently wrapped up a chunk of work on Flathub’s build and publishing infrastructure, which he’s summarised in a blog post . It’s great to see all the improvements that have been made recently.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

gedit 49.0 has been released! Here are the highlights since version 48.0 which dates back from September 2024. (Some sections are a bit technical).

File loading and saving enhancements

A lot of work went into this area. It's mostly under-the-scene changes where there was a lot of dusty code. It's not entirely finished, but there are already user-visible enhancements:

• Loading a big file is now much faster.
• gedit now refuses to load very big files, with a configurable limit ( more details ).

Improved preferences

There is now a "Reset All..." button in the Preferences dialog. And it is now possible to configure the default language used by the spell-checker.

Python plugins removal

Initially due to an external factor, plugins implemented in Python were no longer supported.

During some time a previous version of gedit was packaged in Flathub in a way that still enabled Python plugins, but it is no longer the case.

Even though the problem is fixable, having some plugins in Python meant to deal with a multi-language project, which is much harder to maintain for a single individual. So for now it's preferable to keep only the C language.

So the bad news is that Python plugins support has not been re-enabled in this version, not even for third-party plugins.

More details .

Summary of changes for plugins

The following plugins have been removed:

• Bracket Completion
• Character Map
• Color Picker
• Embedded Terminal
• Join/Split Lines
• Multi Edit
• Session Saver

Only Python plugins have been removed, the C plugins have been kept. The Code Comment plugin which was written in Python has been rewritten in C, so it has not disappeared. And it is planned and desired to bring back some of the removed plugins.

Summary of other news

• Lots of code refactorings have been achieved in the gedit core and in libgedit-gtksourceview.
• A better support for Windows.
• Web presence at gedit-text-editor.org: new domain name and several iterations on the design.
• A half-dozen Gedit Development Guidelines documents have been written.

Wrapping-up statistics for 2025

The total number of commits in gedit and gedit-related git repositories in 2025 is: 884. More precisely:

138	enter-tex
310	gedit
21	gedit-plugins
10	gspell
4	libgedit-amtk
41	libgedit-gfls
290	libgedit-gtksourceview
70	libgedit-tepl

It counts all contributions, translation updates included.

The list contains two apps, gedit and Enter TeX . The rest are shared libraries (re-usable code available to create other text editors).

If you do a comparison with the numbers for 2024 , you'll see that there are fewer commits, the only module with more commits is libgedit-gtksourceview. But 2025 was a good year nevertheless!

For future versions: superset of the subset

With Python plugins removed, the new gedit version is a subset of the previous version, when comparing approximately the list of features. In the future, we plan to have a superset of the subset . That is, to bring in new features and try hard to not remove any more functionality.

In fact, we have reached a point where we are no longer interested to remove any more features from gedit. So the good news is that gedit will normally be incrementally improved from now on without major regressions. We really hope there won't be any new bad surprises due to external factors!

Side note: this "superset of the subset" resembles the evolution of C++, but in the reverse order. Modern C++ will be a subset of the superset to have a language in practice (but not in theory) as safe as Rust (it works with compiler flags to disable the unsafe parts).

Onward to 2026

Since some plugins have been removed, this makes gedit a less advanced text editor. It has become a little less suitable for heavy programming workloads, but for that there are lots of alternatives.

Instead, gedit could become a text editor of choice for newcomers in the computing science field (students and self-learners). It can be a great tool for markup languages too. It can be your daily companion for quite a while, until your needs evolve for something more complete at your workplace. Or it can be that you prefer its simplicity and its not-going-in-the-way default setup, plus the fact that it launches quickly. In short, there are a lot of reasons to still love gedit ❤️ !

If you have any feedback, even for a small thing, I would like to hear from you :) ! The best places are on GNOME Discourse, or GitLab for more actionable tasks (see the Getting in Touch section).

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 09 to January 16.

GNOME Releases

Sophie (she/her) reports

The API, UI, and feature freeze for GNOME 50 is closing in. The deadline is in about two weeks from now on Jan 31 at 23:59 UTC. After that, the focus will be on bug fixes, polishing, and translations for GNOME 50.

Sophie (she/her) announces

GNOME 50 alpha has been released. One of the biggest changes is the removal of X11 support from several components like GNOME Shell, while the login screen can still launch non-X11 sessions of other desktop environments. More information is available in the announcement post .

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan reports

Embellish v0.6.0 was released this week. I finally was able to make the app translatable, which was not easy due to me not knowing how to translate GKeyFiles. I also added Arabic translations.

I had also released v0.5.2 to update to the latest GNOME runtime and switch to the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.

You can get Embellish from flathub

Nathan Perlman announces

v1.1.1 of Rewaita was released this week!

To recap, Rewaita allows you to easily modify Adwaita. Like changing the color scheme to match Tokyonight or Gruvbox, or make the window controls look more like MacOS.

A lot has changed over the last month, so this post covers v1.0.9 -> v1.1.1.

What’s new?

• Patched up most remaining holes in Gnome Shell integration, especially with the overview and dock
• Extra customization options: transparency, window borders, and sharp corners
• Major performance improvements
• Added two new light themes: Kanagawa-Paper, and Thorn
• Fixed issue with Tokyonight Storm
• Now allows palette swapping/tinting your wallpapers
• Added Vietnamese translations, thanks to @hthienloc
• UI changes + uses Fortune for text snippets
• Updated adwgtk3 to v6.4
• New Zypper package for OpenSUSE users
• Won’t autostart when running in background is disabled
• ‘Get Involved’ page now loads correctly

I hope you all enjoy this release, and I look forward to seeing your creations on r/gnome and r/unixporn!

Ronnie Nissan announces

Concessio v0.2.0 and v0.2.1 were released this week. The updates include:

• Switching to Blueprint for UI definitions.
• Update to the latest GNOME runtime.
• Use the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.
• Make the application accessible to screen reader.

Concessio can be downloaded from flathub

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp reports

Turtle 0.14 released!

There has been a massive visual improvement on how the commit log graph looks. Instead of adding branches at the top when “Show All Branches” is enabled it now weaves the branches into the graph directly ontop of its parent commit. This results in a much narrower graph, see screenshot below showing the same git repo before and after the change.

It is now also possible to configure the menu entries of the file manager context menu entries.

See the release for more details .

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Version 0.18.0 of Flare was now released. Besides allowing for Flare being used as a primary device, this release contains a critical hotfix that since Tuesday of this week (2026-01-13) some messages are not received properly anymore, which got worse on Wednesday. I urge everyone to upgrade, and check in with one of their official Signal applications that you have not missed any critical messages.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day says

Another weekly GNOME Foundation update is available this week, covering highlights from the past 7 days. The update includes details from this week’s board meeting, FOSDEM preparations, GUADEC planning, and Flathub infrastructure development.

Digital Wellbeing Project ↗

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) says

As part of the Digital Wellbeing project, sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is an initiative to redesign the Parental Controls to bring it on par with modern GNOME apps and implement new features such as Screen Time monitoring, Bedtime Schedule and Web Filtering.

Recently, the changes preventing children from unlocking after their bedtime and allowing parents to extend their screen time have been merged in GNOME Shell ( !3980 , !3999 ).

These were the last remaining bits for the parental controls session limits integration in Shell 🎉

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

Many years ago when I was a kid, I took typing lessons where they introduced me to a program called Mecawin . With it, I learned how to type, and it became a program I always appreciated not because it was fancy, but because it showed step by step how to work with a keyboard.

Now the circle of life is coming back: my kid will turn 10 this year. So I started searching for a good typing tutor for Linux. I installed and tried all of them, but didn’t like any. I also tried a couple of applications on macOS, some were okish, but they didn’t work properly with Spanish keyboards. At this point, I decided to build something myself. Initially, I  hacked out keypunch, which is a very nice application, but I didn’t like the UI I came up with by modifying it. So in the end, I decided to write my own. Or better yet, let Kiro write an application for me.

Mecalin is meant to be a simple application. The main purpose is teaching people how to type, and the Lessons view is what I’ll be focusing on most during development. Since I don’t have much time these days for new projects. I decided to take this opportunity to use Kiro to do most of the development for me. And to be honest, it did a pretty good job. Sure, there are things that could be better, but I definitely wouldn’t have finished it in this short time otherwise.

So if you are interested, give it a try, go to flathub and install it: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.nacho.mecalin

In this application, you’ll have several lessons that guide you step by step through the different rows of the keyboard, showing you what to type and how to type it.

This is an example of the lesson view.

You also have games.

The falling keys game: keys fall from top to bottom, and if one reaches the bottom of the window, you lose. This game can clearly be improved, and if anybody wants to enhance it, feel free to send a PR.

The scrolling lanes game: you have 4 rows where text moves from right to left. You need to type the words before they reach the leftmost side of the window, otherwise you lose.

For those who want to support your language, there are two JSON files you’ll need to add:

1. The keyboard layout: https://github.com/nacho/mecalin/tree/main/data/keyboard_layouts
2. The lessons: https://github.com/nacho/mecalin/tree/main/data/lessons

Note that the Spanish lesson is the source of truth; the English one is just a translation done by Kiro.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

When I started writing this blog, I didn’t fully understand what “think about your audience” really meant. At first, it sounded like advice meant for marketers or professional writers. But over time, I’ve realized it’s one of the most important lessons I’m learning, not just for writing, but for building software and contributing to open source.

Who I’m Writing (and Building) For

When I sit down to write, I think about a few people.

I think about aspiring developers from non-traditional backgrounds, people who didn’t follow a straight path into tech, who might be self-taught, switching careers, or learning in community-driven programs. I think about people who feel like they don’t quite belong in tech yet, and are looking for proof that they do.

I also think about my past self, about some months ago. Back then, everything felt overwhelming: the tools, the terminology, the imposter syndrome. I remember wishing I could read honest stories from people who were still in the process , not just those who had already “made it.”

And finally, I think about the open-source community I’m now part of: contributors, maintainers, and users who rely on the software we build.

Why My Audience Matters to My Work

Thinking about my audience has changed how I approach my work on Papers.

Papers isn’t just a codebase, it’s a tool used by researchers, students, and academics to manage references and organize their work. When I think about those users, I stop seeing bugs as abstract issues and start seeing them as real problems that affect real people’s workflows.

The same applies to documentation. Remembering how confusing things felt when I was a beginner pushes me to write clearer commit messages, better explanations, and more accessible documentation. I’m no longer writing just to “get the task done”. I’m writing so that someone else, maybe a first-time contributor, can understand and build on my work.

Even this blog is shaped by that mindset. After my first post, someone commented and shared how it resonated with them. That moment reminded me that words can matter just as much as code.

What My Audience Needs From Me

I’ve learned that people don’t just want success stories. They want honesty.

They want to hear about the struggle, the confusion, and the small wins in between. They want proof that non-traditional paths into tech are valid. They want practical lessons they can apply, not just motivation quotes.

Most of all, they want representation and reassurance. Seeing someone who looks like them, or comes from a similar background, navigating open source and learning in public can make the journey feel possible.

That’s a responsibility I take seriously.

How I’ve Adjusted Along the Way

Because I’m thinking about my audience, I’ve changed how I share my journey.

I explain things more clearly. I reflect more deeply on what I’m learning instead of just listing achievements. I’m more intentional about connecting my experiences, debugging a feature, reading unfamiliar code, asking questions in the GNOME community, to lessons others can take away.

Understanding the Papers user base has also influenced how I approach features and fixes. Understanding my blog audience has influenced how I communicate. In both cases, empathy plays a huge role.

Moving Forward

Thinking about my audience has taught me that good software and good writing have something in common: they’re built with people in mind.

As I continue this internship and this blog, I want to keep building tools that are accessible, contributing in ways that lower barriers, and sharing my journey honestly. If even one person reads this and feels more capable, or more encouraged to try, then it’s worth it.

That’s who I’m writing for. And that’s who I’m building for.

It is almost a year since the switch to Vorarbeiter for building and publishing apps. We've made several improvements since then, and it's time to brag about them.

RunsOn ​

In the initial announcement, I mentioned we were using RunsOn , a just-in-time runner provisioning system, to build large apps such as Chromium. Since then, we have fully switched to RunsOn for all builds. Free GitHub runners available to open source projects are heavily overloaded and there are limits on how many concurrent builds can run at a time. With RunsOn, we can request an arbitrary number of threads, memory and disk space, for less than if we were to use paid GitHub runners.

We also rely more on spot instances, which are even cheaper than the usual on demand machines. The downside is that jobs sometimes get interrupted. To avoid spending too much time on retry ping-pong, builds retried with the special bot, retry command use the on-demand instances from the get-go. The same catch applies to large builds, which are unlikely to finish in time before spot instances are reclaimed.

The cost breakdown since May 2025 is as follows:

Once again, we are not actually paying for anything thanks to the AWS credits for open source projects program . Thank you RunsOn team and AWS for making this possible!

Caching ​

Vorarbeiter now supports caching downloads and ccache files between builds. Everything is an OCI image if you are feeling brave enough, and so we are storing the per-app cache with ORAS in GitHub Container Registry.

This is especially useful for cosmetic rebuilds and minor version bumps, where most of the source code remains the same. Your mileage may vary for anything more complex.

End-of-life without rebuilding ​

One of the Buildbot limitations was that it was difficult to retrofit pull requests marking apps as end-of-life without rebuilding them. Flat-manager itself exposes an API call for this since 2019 but we could not really use it, as apps had to be in a buildable state only to deprecate them.

Vorarbeiter will now detect that a PR modifies only the end-of-life keys in the flathub.json file, skip test and regular builds, and directly use the flat-manager API to republish the app with the EOL flag set post-merge.

Web UI ​

GitHub's UI isn't really built for a centralized repository building other repositories. My love-hate relationship with Buildbot made me want to have a similar dashboard for Vorarbeiter.

The new web UI uses PicoCSS and HTMX to provide a tidy table of recent builds. It is unlikely to be particularly interesting to end users, but kinkshaming is not nice, okay? I like to know what's being built and now you can too here .

Reproducible builds ​

We have started testing binary reproducibility of x86_64 builds targetting the stable repository. This is possible thanks to flathub-repro-checker , a tool doing the necessary legwork to recreate the build environment and compare the result of the rebuild with what is published on Flathub.

While these tests have been running for a while now, we have recently restarted them from scratch after enabling S3 storage for diffoscope artifacts. The current status is on the reproducible builds page .

Failures are not currently acted on. When we collect more results, we may start to surface them to app maintainers for investigation. We also don't test direct uploads at the moment.

I, too, have (or as you can probably guess from the title of this post, had) a Facebook account. I only ever used it for two purposes.

1. Finding out what friends I rarely see are doing
2. Getting invites to events

Facebook has over the years made usage #1 pretty much impossible. My feed contains approximately 1% posts by my friends and 99% ads for image meme "humor" groups whose expected amusement value seems to be approximately the same as punching yourself in the groin.

Still, every now and then I get a glimpse of a post by the people I actively chose to follow. Specifically a friend was pondering about the behaviour of people who do happy birthday posts on profiles of deceased people. Like, if you have not kept up with someone enough to know that they are dead, why would you feel the need to post congratulations on their profile pages.

I wrote a reply which is replicated below. It is not accurate as it is a translation and I no longer have access to the original post.

Some of these might come via recommendations by AI assistants. Maybe in the future AI bots from people who themselves are dead carry on posting birthday congratulations on profiles of other dead people. A sort of a social media for the deceased, if you will.

Roughly one minute later my account was suspended. Let that be a lesson to you all. Do not mention the Dead Internet Theory , for doing so threatens Facebook's ad revenue and is thus taboo. (A more probable explanation is that using the word "death" is prohibited by itself regardless of context, leading to idiotic phrasing in the style of "Person X was born on [date] and d!ed [other date]" that you see all over IG, FB and YT nowadays.)

Apparently to reactivate the account I would need to prove that "[I am] a human being". That might be a tall order given that there are days when I doubt that myself.

The reactivation service is designed in the usual deceptive way where it does not tell you all the things you need to do in advance. Instead it bounces you from one task to another in the hopes that sunk cost fallacy makes you submit to ever more egregious demands. I got out when they demanded a full video selfie where I look around different directions. You can make up your own theories as to why Meta, a known advocate for generative AI and all that garbage, would want a high resolution scans of people's faces. I mean, surely they would not use it for AI training without paying a single cent for usage rights to the original model. Right? Right?

The suspension email ends with this ultimatum.

If you think we suspended your account by mistake, you have 180 days to appeal our decision. If you miss this deadline your account will be permanently disabled.

Well, mr Zuckerberg, my response is the following:

Close it! Delete it! Burn it down to the ground! I'd do it myself this very moment, but I can't delete the account without reactivating it first.

Let it also be noted that this post is a much better way of proving that I am a human being than a video selfie thing that could be trivially faked with genAI.