Open Forms is now 0.4.0 - and the GUI Builder is here

A quick recap for the newcomers

Ever been to a conference where you set up a booth or tried to collect quick feedback and experienced the joy of:

• Captive portal logout
• Timeouts
• Flaky Wi-Fi drivers on Linux devices
• Poor bandwidth or dead zones

This is exactly what happened while setting up a booth at GUADEC. The Wi-Fi on the Linux tablet worked, we logged into the captive portal, the chip failed, Wi-Fi gone. Restart. Repeat.

We eventually worked around it with a phone hotspot, but that locked the phone to the booth. A one-off inconvenience? Maybe. But at any conference, summit, or community event, at least one of these happens reliably.

So I looked for a native, offline form collection tool. Nothing existed without a web dependency. So I built one.

Open Forms is a native GNOME app that collects form inputs locally, stores responses in CSV, works completely offline, and never touches an external service. Your data stays on your device. Full stop.

What's new in 0.4.0 - the GUI Form Builder

The original version shipped with one acknowledged limitation: you had to write JSON configs by hand to define your forms.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Writing JSON to set up a form? That's totally normal and not at all a terrible first impression for non-technical users." And you'd be completely wrong, to me it was normal and then my sis had this to say "who even thought JSON for such a basic thing is a good idea, who'd even write one" which was true. I knew it and hence it was always on the roadmap to fix, which 0.4.0 finally fixes.

Open Forms now ships a full visual form builder.

Design a form entirely from the UI - add fields, set labels, reorder things, tweak options, and hit Save. That's it. The builder writes a standard JSON config to disk, same schema as always, so nothing downstream changes.

It also works as an editor. Open an existing config, click Edit, and the whole form loads up ready to tweak. Save goes back to the original file. No more JSON editing required.

Libadwaita is genuinely great

The builder needed to work well on both a regular desktop and a Linux phone without me maintaining two separate layouts or sprinkling breakpoints everywhere. Libadwaita just... handles that.

The result is that Open Forms feels native on GNOME and equally at home on a Linux phone, and I genuinely didn't have to think hard about either. That's the kind of toolkit win that's hard to overstate when you're building something solo over weekends.

---

The JSON schema is unchanged

If you already have configs, they work exactly as before. The builder is purely additive, it reads and writes the same format. If you like editing JSON directly, nothing stops you. I'm not going to judge, but my sister might.

Also thanks to Felipe and all others who gave great ideas about increasing maintainability. JSON might become a technical debt in future, and I appreciate the insights about the same. Let's see how it goes.

Install

Snap Store

snap install open-forms

Flatpak / Build from source

See the GitHub repository for build instructions. There is also a Flatpak release available .

What's next

• A11y improvements
• Maybe and just maybe an optional sync feature
• Hosting on Flathub - if you've been through that process and have advice, please reach out

---

Open Forms is still a small, focused project doing one thing. If you've ever dealt with Wi-Fi pain while collecting data at an event, give it a try. Bug reports, feature requests, and feedback are all very welcome.

And if you find it useful - a star on GitHub goes a long way for a solo project. 🙂

Open Forms on GitHub

For almost two decades, the PackageKit package management abstraction layer has shipped with pkcon as its command-line client. pkcon does its job, but it was always kind of a “testing” front-end for the PackageKit daemon rather than a tool designed for everyday use. The focus has instead been on the GUI tools, automatic system updates, GUI application managers and other front-ends. Its command names mirror the D-Bus API almost one-to-one ( get-details , get-updates , get-depends ), output is very plain, and there is no machine-readable mode for scripting. Most importantly though, there has been no development on it at all for almost a decade, so pkcon was stuck in its rudimentary state from that era.

Since a lot of changes will be coming to PackageKit, and testing the daemon and working with it from the command-line was not very pleasant anymore in 2025/2026, I decided to modernize the tool as part of my work as fellow for the Sovereign Tech Agency last year. pkgcli is the new command-line client for PackageKit. It is built from the ground up to be pleasant to use interactively and easy to drive from scripts.

Why a new tool?

Of course, instead of introducing a new tool, I could have just expanded pkcon instead. The problem with that approach is that the pkcon utility has been around for so long and its command-line API had ossified so much, that rather than changing it and potentially breaking a lot of scripts relying on its quirks, I decided to introduce a new tool instead. pkcon can still be optionally compiled for people who need it in their scripts and workflows.

The goals for pkgcli , and the features it now has are:

• Human-friendly command names. Verbs that read the way you’d describe the task, instead of mirroring the D-Bus API 1:1: show , search , list-updates , what-provides , instead of get-details and friends.
• Readable, c o l o r e d output by default (still respecting NO_COLOR and degrading gracefully).
• A real scripting mode. A global --json flag emits JSONL instead of fully human-readable output when possible, to make it easier to use the tool for scripting purposes.
• Sensible defaults. A few defaults have been changed, such as the metadata cache-age, or automatic cleanup of unused dependencies being enabled by default. This is more in line with current defaults by other tools and frontends. We also print package information in a slightly different, more readable way.
• Better handling of internationalized text . Text should now align properly in the terminal window, and we should no longer have completely chaotic text output on non-English locales (especially Chinese/Japanese).

Why not pkgctl ?

Originally, this tool was called pkgctl , to match other common cross-distro tool names. However, that name was already taken by an Arch-specific distro development tool . When this issue was raised, we decided to just rename our tool to pkgcli with the next release, to avoid the name clash on Arch Linux.

Examples!

Here are some examples on how to use the new tool (some of which include the abridged output pkgcli prints).

Search for anything containing the string “editor” in name or description, then look at the details of one result:

$ pkgcli search editor
▣ ace-of-penguins 1.5~rc2-7.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ acorn-fdisk 3.0.6-14.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ ardour 1:9.2.0+ds-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
✔ audacity 3.7.7+dfsg-1.amd64 [manual:debian-testing-main]
✔ audacity-data 3.7.7+dfsg-1.all [auto:debian-testing-main]
▣ augeas-tools 1.14.1-1.1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ emacs 1:30.2+1-3.all [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit 48.1-9+b1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit-common 48.1-9.all [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit-dev 48.1-9+b1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
[...]

$ pkgcli show nano
Querying                  [████████████████████████████████████████] 100%
Package: nano
Version: 9.0-1
Summary: small, friendly text editor inspired by Pico
Description: GNU nano is an easy-to-use text editor originally designed as
 a replacement for Pico, the ncurses-based editor from the non-free mailer
 package Pine.
[...]
URL: https://www.nano-editor.org/
Group: publishing
Installed Size: 2.9 MB
Download Size: 646.0 KB

Search only within package names rather than descriptions:

$ pkgcli search name python3

Check for updates. refresh updates the metadata, then list-updates reports what’s available:

$ pkgcli refresh && pkgcli list-updates
Loading cache            [████████████████████████████████████████] 100%
▲ cme 1.048-1.all [debian-testing-main]
▲ gir1.2-gdm-1.0 50.1-2.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick-7-common 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.all [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick-7.q16 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libdlrestrictions1 0.22.0.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libfftw3-bin 3.3.11-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libfftw3-dev 3.3.11-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]

Explore relationships between packages:

$ pkgcli list-depends inkscape  # list what inkscape depends on
$ pkgcli list-requiring libappstream5  # list what requires libappstream5

Find the package that provides a capability, here the AV1 GStreamer decoder:

$ pkgcli what-provides "gstreamer1(decoder-video/x-av1)"
✔ gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad 1.28.3-1.amd64 [auto:debian-testing-main]

You can also have JSON output for most commands! Attach --json to any query and pipe the result straight into jq . Each line is a self-contained JSON object:

$ pkgcli --json list-updates | jq -r '.name'
cme
gir1.2-gdm-1.0
imagemagick
imagemagick-7-common
imagemagick-7.q16
libdlrestrictions1
libfftw3-bin
libfftw3-dev
libfftw3-double3

Try it

pkgcli is built by default alongside the rest of PackageKit since PackageKit 1.3.4. If your distribution ships a recent enough PackageKit, it should already be on your PATH . You can read its man page man pkgcli for more information. Feedback, bug reports, and patches are very welcome .

I occasionally see people go through great effort to do end-to-end testing of keyboard input latency. That is fantastic but it requires hardware and patience I don’t, nor will ever, have.

Here is a much simpler way to get about 90% of the value. For example, everything but driver/interrupt handler latency and display link scanout/monitor visibility latency and of course your app side (but you could theoretically rig this up to do that too, inside your app). Not that those aren’t important, but they definitely fall into the category of things I personally cannot control for you.

Keyspeed is a very simple GTK application which uses /dev/uinput to synthesize keypresses. Since it knows the time of provenance, it can compare that to when it gets the event back from compositor delivery.

Wrap all that data up in Sysprof capture marks, pull in some from the compositor (GNOME Shell/Mutter support this), tie in some callgraphs/flamegraphs, and you have a very good overview of what is going on during your keypress.

Run it like this (but remember to chmod back when you’re done less you have attack surface available).

$ sudo chmod 660 /dev/uinput
$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/keypress
$ sudo dnf install sysprof-devel libinput-devel gtk4-devel
$ make
$ sysprof-cli --gtk --gnome-shell capture.syscap -- ./keyspeed
$ sysprof capture.syscap

Currently, this only shows you keypress send to receive in GTK, but if someone cared enough, you could make it take the next GtkFrameTimings and use that to get the presentation time. I don’t need that for what I’m doing, so it doesn’t.

If you go to the marks section, you can dive in to a specific keypress/release cycle. Zoom in on just that section, switch back to callgraph/flamegraph profiler and see what was going on.

Pretty simple, no special hardware needed.

You can see how long it took, where time was spent, and more importantly, how much time was empty between things that matter.

Greetings from Planet Peanut!

Since there’s a whole new generation of GNOME contributors active right now, I’ll do a short reintroduction: Hello, I’m Hylke !

I was a design contributor in the late 2.X, early 3.X days. Mainly icons and theming. I’ve attended many GUADECs .

I’m also the developer of SparkleShare , a Git-based file sync app. Once a much used tool by the Design Team to collaborate on mockups, now in need for some love and care.

After many years just lurking I’m happy to be officially back as a GNOME Foundation member now that Bobby has joined Circle .

App icons created in recent months

New plan

I lost my job this year due to the big tech layoffs . Also dealing with burnout, it made me realise I need to go back to working on things that matter to me.

I would love to contribute design full-time.

If you like my work and want to support me, I’m trying to gather enough small monthly sponsors to support me with a basic income. Every little helps.

My focus for 2026:

• Supply a stream of icons to the Linux ecosystem by designing at least one app icon a week . Developers can request free icons .
• Reboot SparkleShare . Finish the rewrite in Rust and redesign the interface with GTK4 and libadwaita .
• Launch a FOSS design service . Make a plan for sustainably assist FOSS communities with product design work.

I will post frequent updates here and on the Fediverse .

Good to be back!

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 5 to June 12.

GNOME Foundation

marimaj reports

The GNOME Foundation has selected the first recipients who will receive funding through its new Fellowship program, and is delighted to announce that Peter Eisenmann and Sophie Herold will begin work as our first Fellows in July.

Sophie and Peter are both long-running GNOME contributors, with many significant contributions as members of the GNOME community. Sophie is known as developer of apps, libraries, and websites, including Loupe, Pika Backup, Glycin, and welcome.gnome.org. Peter is a long-standing Nautilus maintainer (officially known as the Files app), as well as an experienced contributor to platform libraries, including GTK and GLib.

Full announcement: https://blogs.gnome.org/foundation/2026/06/11/announcing-our-first-fellows/

Miscellaneous

Philipp Sauberzweig reports

I’m excited to share with you that I’ll be joining the Sovereign Tech Agency as a fellow for the GNOME Design Team starting in July. Check out the announcement and the full cohort of fellows in the official blogpost .

During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My focus will be on increasing the visibility of design work, improving documentation, tools, and templates, and supporting the onboarding of new contributors.

I’m looking forward to meeting many of you (again) at GUADEC and I’ll post more about my activities soon. I’m currently wrapping up projects from my previous job and taking some time off. See you all back in July.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps now shows departures (and arrivals) for public transit stops/stations (when data is available in Transitous)

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Tuba ↗

Browse the Fediverse.

GeopJr 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 says

This week, Tuba was ported to Android, opening up exciting new opportunities, as we get closer to the next release!

Third Party Projects

Jiri Eischmann reports

Meshy 26.06 has been released . It’s the first stable release of MeshCore client for Linux written in Python, GTK 4, and libadwaita.

It has a feature parity with the official client, but provides native look & feel striving for the best possible integration with the Linux desktop, primarily GNOME.

You can install stable releases of Meshy from Flathub or developoment releases from the app’s flatpak repo .

Stable releases are planned at a rate of once per month.

Anton Isaiev announces

RustConn 0.16 Released

RustConn just turned one year old, and 0.16 is out. Thank you to everyone who uses it and files reports - that feedback shapes every release.

The biggest change this cycle is the move to IronRDP 0.15: bulk compression for lower bandwidth on slow links, slow-path rendering (XRDP and older Windows no longer show a blank screen), and better compatibility with GNOME Remote Desktop. Huge thanks to the IronRDP project and to all the open projects RustConn builds on for its connections.

Other highlights, all requested by users:

• Connections with notes now show a small badge in the sidebar, so you can see at a glance which entries have documentation (search also takes into account the content of notes).
• Snap packaging caught up with the Flatpak build.
• A lot of macOS fixes (Keychain, SSH password auth, tray).
• A new Windows / WSL2 setup guide.
• Plus many small GNOME HIG refinements across the settings dialog and sidebar.

Homepage: https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

austin says

Gelly 1.6 was released this week. Gelly is a Jellyfin and Subsonic/Navidrome compatible player using GNOME technologies. The last month has seen an uptick in development and contributions, with a few major features added:

• Gapless playback
• UI polish, including a new compact mode
• NFC card support with the companion gelly-nfc project
• Favorites
• Internationalization

Gelly needs help with translations! Please see the README for details. Thanks to all that have already contributed!

https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.m51.Gelly

Ans Ibrahim announces

Memento , the movie and tv tracking app, got updates this week with version 1.3.0 :

• Backup and Restore functionality was implemented
• Import from Ticketbooth is supported
• Import for Movary plays and watchlist is supported
• Users can add plays without date

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Fractal 14 has landed and is packed with lots of small changes, that make for an even better experience. Here is a quick reminder of the changes since Fractal 13:

• Call rooms are identified with a camera icon in the sidebar and show a banner to warn that other users might not read messages in these rooms.
• Calls are rendered in the timeline and incoming calls trigger a notification. We still don’t support calls, but at least now you know when someone is calling and can open another client to answer.
• While we still support signing in via SSO, we have dropped support for identity providers, to simplify our code and a have a closer experience to signing in with OAuth 2.0.
• The sidebar room filter has been improved: Enter goes to first room result, and there’s an empty state when no results match the term.
• The performance of the room list has also been improved, it should be mostly noticeable for accounts that have joined a lot of rooms.
• Informative events ( Unable to decrypt , server notices…) are now styled differently to reflect their special nature and differentiate them from regular text messages that anyone can send.
• Sending files & location is properly disabled while editing/replying, as it doesn’t work anyway.

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies .

This version is available right now on Flathub .

This cycle, we were lucky enough to get a higher than usual number of new contributors. Most of the changes listed above come from them. If you want to join the gang, you can start by fixing one of our newcomers issues . We are always looking for new members!

Shell Extensions

Carlos Jiménez reports

New version of Gnome Football extension, now with a calendar panel integration: https://github.com/carlosjdelgado/GnomeFootball/releases/tag/v2.0.0

Arnis (kem-a) announces

Kiwi (is not Apple) brings a bit of macOS feel to GNOME without getting in the way of the desktop you already use. The idea is to help people coming from macOS settle into Linux and feel at home on GNOME right away. It is fairly feature-rich and modular: macOS-style window control buttons, window controls and titles in the top panel for maximized apps, battery percentage when you are getting low, and a calendar moved to the right with notifications tucked into Quick Settings, accent colored menu entries, among others. The restyling is deliberately minimal, so it plays nice with default Adwaita theme and the rest of your setup.

The latest update v1.7.0 improves the dynamic blur implementation (of course, there is blur) to the top panel, dash via Dash to Dock, and the Overview background, and adds a smoother, slowed workspace switch transition.

Install it from GNOME Extensions or get it from GitHub

Just Perfection says

A new rule has been added to the EGO review guidelines to prevent GNOME Shell extensions from including unnecessary keys in metadata.json .

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!

Greetings from Planet Peanut!

Since there’s a whole new generation of GNOME contributors active right now, I’ll do a short reintroduction: Hello, I’m Hylke !

I was a design contributor in the late 2.X, early 3.X days. Mainly icons and theming. I’ve attended many GUADECs .

I’m also the developer of SparkleShare , a Git-based file sync app. Once a much used tool by the Design Team to collaborate on mockups, now in need for some love and care.

After many years just lurking I’m happy to be officially back as a GNOME Foundation member now that Bobby has joined Circle .

App icons created in recent months

New plan

I lost my job this year due to the big tech layoffs . Also dealing with burnout, it made me realise I need to go back to working on things that matter to me.

I would love to contribute design full-time.

If you like my work and want to support me, I’m trying to gather enough small monthly sponsors to support me with a basic income. Every little helps.

My focus for 2026:

• Supply a stream of icons to the Linux ecosystem by designing at least one app icon a week . Developers can request free icons .
• Reboot SparkleShare . Finish the rewrite in Rust and redesign the interface with GTK4 and libadwaita .
• Launch a FOSS design service . Make a plan for sustainably assist FOSS communities with product design work.

I will post frequent updates here and on the Fediverse .

Good to be back!

]

From white-boarding my ideas on a Google Doc, to writing a formal design document in Crosswords, my ability to communicate technical ideas clearly is being put to the test.

Writing documentation is critical to guide others’ understanding of the code and choices made on a particular codebase. Especially when several developers are introduced to the system, a way to reference material leads to more preparedness to contribute to the codebase.

I wrote a design document introducing the concepts I would like to implement towards creating a way to generate a dynamic grid. Critique is welcome.

Standard libipuz crosswords currently rely on using an existing dictionary to fill a static box of X length x Y width. However, the implementation of vocab puzzles goes against this logic and instead generates a new grid of N length x M width based on a list of 0 <= W <= 30 words of 1 <= L <= 25 characters long.

I reconsidered the idea of using a GArray to store unplaced words because I want something idempotent. To avoid unwanted time complexity bloat, the backend should not carry the memory of unplaced words. Instead, the frontend will compare the generated grid against the original list to manage words that couldn’t be placed.

Integrating this new feature will be a fascinating technical challenge.

I created a new IpuzVocab class which inherits from IpuzCrossword. I learned how GNOME manages its developer documentation by writing a file myself to introduce this class. Writing this document made me think about the whole picture: how vocab puzzles handle grids, clues, and guesses, comparing it to standard crossword puzzles. I wrote the support to display a vocab puzzle in light and dark mode, with my next goal to integrate them via gi-docgen.

The GNOME Foundation has selected the first recipients who will receive funding through its new Fellowship program , and is delighted to announce that Peter Eisenmann and Sophie Herold will begin work as our first Fellows in July.

Sophie and Peter are both long-running GNOME contributors, with many significant contributions as members of the GNOME community. Sophie is known as developer of apps, libraries, and websites, including Loupe, Pika Backup, Glycin, and welcome.gnome.org . Peter is a long-standing Nautilus maintainer (officially known as the Files app), as well as an experienced contributor to platform libraries, including GTK and GLib.

Both Fellows will spend time working to enhance the long-term sustainability and health of the GNOME project. Sophie will be working to establish a new RFC process for GNOME, which will enhance our project-level governance. She will also be working on more maintainable and secure libraries through Rust adoption. Peter will work to modernize many aspects of the Files app, including thumbnailing, user directory localization, and the use of modern GNOME platform conventions.

Congratulations to Peter and Sophie – we’re genuinely excited to see what you’ll achieve as our first Fellows, and proud to be supporting your work.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted applications to the first round of the Fellowship. We received some genuinely excellent proposals, and would strongly encourage unsuccessful applicants to apply again in future rounds.

Peter and Sophie’s work is made possible by the generosity of GNOME’s supporters. If you’d like to help fund future rounds and support contributors like them, please consider donating .

Terry Godier wrote a beautiful essay "The Boring Internet" . The internet isn't dying, he argues, just the commercial veneer glued on top of it is. Underneath all the engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, there's still an older, slower, more federated web. One built on protocols nobody owns. RSS feeds still work (thank you, Aaron), people can set up websites and blogs.

Lets start a webring in 2026

Don't worry, I haven't pushed too many pixels and gone a little cuckoo. But it's a fun exercise to remind what the web once was. We'll silently skip over the fact that I actually started using gopher first, but even web surfing didn't begin on a search engine back in the day. It was web rings , later followed by index sites.

Start

Not long ago I posted about designing app icons for 3rd party GNOME app developers . The post generated quite some buzz and some old and new faces started showing up to help with the backlog. So obviously I'd like to take you on a webring tour of all the designers responsible for making the GNOME app ecosystem a little less awkward to browse on Flathub .

Let me introduce you to Brage. He's been around for a couple of years now, helping to tame the flames of the reddit community , helping with the GNOME Circle project to improve the quality of GNOME apps in the wild, creating illustrations for initial states in apps, authoring some noteworthy apps himself . So thank you, Brage, welcome to the 90s!

Next Up: Brage Fuglseth