This past week volunteers working with the GNOME design and engagement teams debuted a brand new GNOME.org website—one that was met largely with one of two reactions:

1. It’s beautiful and modern, nice work! and

2. What have you done with the foot? You have ruined GNOME!

You see, the site didn’t feature the GNOME logo at the top of the page—it was just the word GNOME , with the actual logo relegated to the footer. It’s pretty safe to say (from my own observations, at least) that the second reaction was mostly the sentiment of a handful of long-time contributors who had grown very cozy with the current GNOME logo:

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What’s the problem?

It’s a four-toed foot that is sort of supposed to look like a letter G. According to legend (read: my conversations with designers and contributors who have been working with GNOME for more years than I have fingers and toes), the logo is basically a story of happenstance: an early wallpaper featured footprints in the sand, that was modified into an icon for the menu, that was turned into a sort of logo while being modified to look like the letter G, and then that version was cleaned up a bit and successfully trademarked by the GNOME Foundation.

If I’m being honest, it’s not a particularly good logo: it doesn’t convey anything about the project (which by itself is fine… many logos don’t directly!), it’s an awkward shape that doesn’t fit cleanly into a square or circle, especially at smaller sizes (e.g. for social media avatar or favicon), and—I’ll be completely honest—way too many people have turned their nose up at the weird foot sticker on my laptop. It doesn’t exactly set a great first impression for a community and modern computing platform.

But… it’s cozy! Folks who have been around in the community for longer than me have clearly gotten used to the foot, and appreciate it for being goofy, whimsical, unserious. It has some amount of brand recognition, at least within the open source space.

So what can we do?

While there are some folks that would push for a complete rebrand of GNOME—name included, I feel like there’s a softer approach we could take to the issue. In some ways, it has been an unspoken natural phenomenon as members of the GNOME design team have soured a bit on trying to make designs look nice while accomodating a funky four-toed G-ish foot:

1. Phase the foot out from user-facing spaces since it’s hard to work with in all of the contexts we need to use a logo, and it’s not particularly attractive to new users or contributors—something we need to keep in mind as an aging open source project. We’ve started to see less prominent usage of the foot anyway, e.g. on release notes , the new website, and in other spaces where contributors aren’t the most fond of it.

2. Continue to modernize the GNOME brand by leaning into our use of color, animation, illustrations, and recurring motifs (like the amazing wallpapers from Jakub!). Again this is something that has sort of started happening naturally, e.g. with the web team’s newer web designs and as the design team made the decision to move to Inter-based Adwaita Sans for the user interface. And this push continues to receive positive feedback—it’s just not yet officially reflected as well as it could be in the brand guidelines.

3. Immortalize the foot as a mascot , something to be used as an easter egg, in developer documentation, and in contributor-facing spaces. It’s a bit easier to tell newcomers, “oh this is a fun icon that used to be our logo—we love it, even if it’s kind of goofy” without it having to represent our entire brand from the outside. It remains a symbol for the contributor community while avoiding it necessarily representing the entire GNOME brand.

4. Commission a new logo to represent GNOME to the outside world; this would be the logo you’d expect to see at GNOME.org, on user-facing social media profiles, on event banners, etc. We’ve been mulling ideas over in the design team for literal years at this point, but it’s been difficult to pursue anything seriously without attracting very loud negative feedback from a handful of folks—perhaps if it is part of a longer-term plan explicitly including the above steps, it could be something we’d be able to pursue. And it could still be something quirky, cute, and whimsical! I personally don’t love the idea of something as generic as a circle as a logo—I think something that connects to “GNOME” or our history would be great here.

5. Stretch goal: title-case Gnome as a brand name . We’ve long moved past GNOME being an acronym (GNU Network Object Model Environment?)—with a bit of a soft rebrand, I feel we could officially say that it’s spelled “Gnome,” especially if done so in an official logo. As we know, much like the pronounciation of GNOME itself, folks will do what they want—and they’re free to!—but this would me more about how the brand name is used in official capacity. I don’t feel super strongly about this one, but it is awkward to have to explain why it’s all-caps, why it’s called GNOME, and why the logo is a foot any time I tell someone what I contribute to. ;)

What do you think?

I promise I’m not trying to start flame wars here; I genuinely think GNOME as a project and community is in a good place to move forward with modernizing our image a bit. Members of the design team like Jakub, Tobias, Sam, and Allan and contributors across the project like Alice, Sophie, and probably half a dozen more have been working hard at modernizing our UI and image when it comes to software—I think it’s time we caught up with the brand itself.

Hit me up on Mastodon or any of the links in the footer to tell me if you think I’m right, or if I’ve gotten this all terribly wrong. :)

• Cartoon drawing update with Dave, getting nicely ahead. Partner call.
• Published the next strip: celebrating working together
  
• Pleased to see my FOSDEM talk videos released: Collabora Online - richer collaboration , Automatic Documents packed with content and signed , and COOL – LibreOffice Technology in the browser , the recording teams do such an amazing job there.

• Planning call, sync with Karen, Andras & partners. Out for a run in the afternoon with J. - lovely. Worked late trying to dig back through piled-up E-mail.

A new year begins, a good time to share some various news about gedit .

gedit-text-editor.org

gedit has a new domain name for its website:

gedit-text-editor.org

Previously, the gedit homepage was on the GNOME wiki , but the wiki has been retired. So a new website has been set up.

Some work on the website is still necessary, especially to better support mobile devices (responsive web design), and also for printing the pages. If you are a seasoned web developer and want to contribute, don't hesitate to get in touch!

Wrapping-up statistics for 2024

The total number of commits in gedit and gedit-related git repositories in 2024 is: 1042. More precisely:

300	enter-tex
365	gedit
52	gedit-plugins
50	gspell
13	libgedit-amtk
54	libgedit-gfls
47	libgedit-gtksourceview
161	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).

Enter TeX is a TeX/LaTeX editor previously named LaTeXila and GNOME LaTeX. It depends on Gedit Technology and drives some of its development. So it makes sense to include it alongside gedit. A blog post about Enter TeX will most probably be written, to shed some light on this project that started in 2009.

Onwards to 2025

The development continues! To get the latest news, you can follow this blog or, alternatively, you can follow me on Mastodon .

This article was written by Sébastien Wilmet, currently the main developer behind gedit.

As promised, I wanted to write a blog post about this application.

Enter TeX is a TeX / LaTeX text editor previously named LaTeXila and then GNOME LaTeX. It is based on the same libraries as gedit .

Renames

LaTeXila was a fun name that I picked up when I was a student back in 2009. Then the project was renamed to GNOME LaTeX in 2017 but it was not a great choice because of the GNOME trademark. Now it is called Enter TeX .

By having "TeX" in the name is more future-proof than "LaTeX", because there is also Plain TeX, ConTeXt and GNU Texinfo . Only LaTeX is currently well supported by Enter TeX, but the support for other variants would be a welcome addition.

Note that the settings and configuration files are automatically migrated from LaTeXila or GNOME LaTeX to Enter TeX.

There is another rename: the namespace for the C code has been changed from "Latexila" to "Gtex", to have a shorter and better name.

Other news

If you're curious, you can read the top of the NEWS file , it has all the details.

If I look at the achievements file , there is also the port from Autotools to Meson that was done recently and is worth mentioning.

Known issue for the icons

Enter TeX unfortunately suffers from a combination of changes in adwaita-icon-theme and GThemedIcon (part of GIO). Link to the issue on GitLab .

Compare the two screenshots and choose the one you prefer:

As an interim solution, what I do is to install adwaita-icon-theme 41.0 in the same prefix as where Enter TeX is installed (not a system-wide prefix).

To summarize

• LaTeXila -> GNOME LaTeX -> Enter TeX
• C code namespace: Latexila -> Gtex
• Build system: Autotools -> Meson
• An old version of adwaita-icon-theme is necessary.

This article was written by Sébastien Wilmet, currently the main developer behind Enter TeX.

For at least the last 15 years, the translations of GNOME into Czech have been in excellent condition. With each release, I would only report that everything was translated, and for the last few years, this was also true the vast majority of the documentation. However, last year things started to falter. Contributors who had been carrying this for many years left, and there is no one to take over after them. Therefore, we have decided to admit it publicly: GNOME currently has no Czech translators, and unless someone new takes over, the translations will gradually decline.

Personally, I started working on GNOME translations in 2008 when I began translating my favorite groupware client – Evolution. At that time, the leadership of the translation team was taken over by Petr Kovář, who was later joined by Marek Černocký who maintained the translations for many years and did an enormous amount of work. Thanks to him, GNOME was almost 100% translated into Czech, including the documentation. However, both have completely withdrawn from the translations. For a while, they were replaced by Vojtěch Perník and Daniel Rusek, but the former has also left, and Dan has now come to the conclusion that he can no longer carry on the translations alone.

I suggested to Dan that instead of trying to appeal to those who the GNOME translations have relied on for nearly two decades—who have already contributed a lot and are probably facing some form of burnout or have simply moved on to something else after so many years—it would be better to reach out to the broader community to see if there is someone from a new generation who would be willing and energetic enough to take over the translations. Just as we did nearly two decades ago.

It may turn out that an essential part of this process will be that the GNOME translations into Czech will decline for some time.Because the same people have been doing the job for so many years, the community has gotten used to taking excellent translations for granted. But it is not. Someone has to do the work. As more and more English terms appear in the GNOME interface, perhaps dissatisfaction will motivate someone to do something about it. After all, that was the motivation for the previous generation to get involved.

If someone like that comes forward, Dan and I are willing to help them with training and gradually hand over the project. We may both continue to contribute in a limited capacity, but the project needs someone new, ideally not just one person, but several, because carrying it alone is a path to burnout. Interested parties can contact us in the mailing list of the Czech translation team at diskuze-l10n-cz@lists.openalt.org .