Hello world! Last week, I asked the people that financially support me, if I should post my updates publicly. A majority voted to release my future weekly reports to the public, some voted to make them public every other week. So I will try to post some of them publicly in the future.

These updates are made possible by the amazing people that support me on Ko-fi , Patreon , Open Collective , and GitHub ! Thank you so much, folks!

Since this is my first public weekly report, let’s maybe start with a short introduction: I started my GNOME related work in 2018 by working on Gajim and starting the Pika Backup project. Since March 2024 I have slowly started to ask for donations for my work on GNOME. I am disabled due to ME/CFS and being autistic. Working within the GNOME project allows me to earn a bit of extra money on top of my social assistance while also doing something that I love, and I can do at my own pace. I am working on too many things within GNOME: Pika Backup, Loupe, glycin, websites, Release Team, Circle Committee, and a bunch of other things, like trying to advocate for queer and disabled people within the GNOME community.

You will notice that my weekly reports will usually not contain giant achievements or huge promises. Maintenance work can be tedious, and generally, fundraisers have developed a frustrating habit of frequently over-promising and under-delivering. I don’t want to be part of that.

So, let’s finally get to the actual updates for last week. We landed the translation support within www.gnome.org. At the moment, this is still practically invisible. We are waiting for the Translation Team to enable translators to do the work. Once we got some translations, we will also enable the language selection dialog. I also asked if we want translations for donate.gnome.org , but got no feedback so far.

A release for gst-thumbnailers is now out, such that distributions can package it. There is more about the thumbnailers in the Release Team issue .  I updated the Circle benefits list, and updated circle.gnome.org to the version that does not list apps and components on its own. That’s something design people wanted to see for a while. Since the old Circle page stopped building, that was a good moment to finally do it :)

I spend some time on Pika Backup hoping that we are very close to a 0.8 beta release. However, I noticed that the current state of the setup dialog isn’t what we want. After discussing the options with Fina, we are now sure that we have to rework what we have in some way. Not shying away from throwing code away, and reworking something again, is often very important for approaching at a good result. Maybe I will summarize this example, once we have arrived at a solution.

Some of the less tangible work this week: Shortly discussed Emmanuele’s GNOME Governance proposal in Matrix. Something that might look like making changes within GNOME more complicated from the outside. But the actual goal is the opposite: Currently, it can be very hard to make changes within GNOME since there is no clear way how to go about it. This not only slows people down but, at least for me, can also me quite emotionally draining. So, a very important proposal. Maybe we got a tiny step closer to making it reality. Also contributed to an internal Release Team discussion and contacted an involved party.

That’s all for this week! If you want to support my work financially, you can check my GitLab profile .

Hope you all have a great week!