It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post about my work on GNOME Design and Community Management as part of my Sovereign Tech Fellowship. As usual, I want to share some of the most interesting developments.

Passkey Portal

Passkeys are an easy and safe way to sign in, and can replace passwords. They’re tied to the website that issued them, so they can’t be phished. Hackers can’t steal them from a website because its servers don’t store your private key. You can learn more about passkeys and how they work at whatarepasskeys.info.

People have been working to bring passkey support to Linux for several years, and we’re getting closer to making it available to users. Just today, the experimental credentials portal was merged into xdg-desktop-portal. To support its implementation in GNOME, I’ve spent a lot of time researching and refining the design of the credentials portal. Below is an excerpt from the credentials portal mockup. Take a look at the full mockup in the OS mockups repository for all the user interaction flows.

Some details of the credentials portal mockup showing the passkey creation

Libadwaita

In my last blog post, I wrote about standardizing scale rows in libadwaita and mentioned that ActionRow would likely get a generic bottom child widget to support the change. This has now landed as the ActionRow:body property, and the calendar app Era already uses it to implement its participants row.

Screenshot of the calendar app Era with a participants row based using the new ActionRow:body property

The new scale style has also already landed in the upcoming libadwaita version.

Screenshot of the new scale style with pill shaped knob

Other

If you’ve read this blog before, you may have noticed that the font has changed. Inter has been installed on GNOME’s WordPress instance, so community members can now use it on their personal GNOME blogs to keep their typography consistent with GNOME’s web standards.

As usual, I’ve reviewed design changes across various projects and answered questions on Matrix and in issue threads. GNOME Circle reviews are also progressing well, and I’ll write more about them as the changes land.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment on this blog or reach out to me on Mastodon or Matrix.