Today marks the end of the community bonding period, and the start of the coding period, of GSoC.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been looking into other crossword editors that are on the market, in order to see what features they have that we should implement. I compiled everything I saw into a findings document .

Once that was done, I went through the document and distilled it down into a final list. I also added other feature ideas that I already had in mind.

Eventually, through a discussion with my mentor, we decided that I should start by tackling a bug that I found . This will help me get more familiar with the fill algorithm code, and it will inform my decisions going forward, in terms of what features I should work on.

So far, GNOME OS has mostly been used for testing in virtual machines, but what if you could just use it as your primary OS on real hardware?

Turns out you can!

While it’s still early days and it’s not recommended for non-technical audiences, GNOME OS is now ready for developers and early adopters who know how to deal with occasional bugs (and importantly, file those bugs when they occur).

The Challenge

To get GNOME OS to the next stage we need a lot more hardware testing. This is why this summer (June, July, and August) we’re launching a GNOME OS daily-driving challenge. This is how it works:

• 10 points for daily driving GNOME OS on your primary computer for at least 4 weeks
• 1 point for every (valid, non-duplicate) issue created
• 3 points for every (merged) merge request
• 5 points for fixing an open issue

You can sign up for the challenge and claim points by adding yourself to the list of participants on the Hedgedoc . As the challenge progresses, add any issues and MRs you opened to the list.

The person with the most points on September 1 will receive a OnePlus 6 (running postmarketOS, unless someone gets GNOME OS to work on it by then). The three people with the most points on September 1 (noon UTC) will receive a limited-edition shirt (stay tuned for designs!).

Important links:

• To install GNOME OS on real hardware follow the installation instructions .
• For questions and problems, use the GNOME OS Matrix channel .
• File any GNOME OS issues you encounter here .

FAQ

Why GNOME OS?

Using GNOME OS Nightly means you’re running the latest latest main for all of our projects. This means you get all the dope new features as they land, months before they hit Fedora Rawhide et al.

For GNOME contributors that’s especially valuable because it allows for easy testing of things that are annoying/impossible to try in a VM or nested session (e.g. notifications or touch input). For feature branches there’s also the possibility to install a sysext of a development branch for system components, making it easy to try things out before they’ve even landed.

More people daily driving Nightly has huge benefits for the ecosystem, because it allows for catching issues early in the cycle, while they’re still easy to fix.

Is my device supported?

Most laptops from the past 5 years are probably fine, especially Thinkpads. The most important specs you need are UEFI and if you want to test the TPM security features you need a semi-recent TPM (any Windows 11 laptop should have that). If you’re not sure, ask in the GNOME OS channel .

Does $APP work on GNOME OS?

Anything available as a Flatpak works fine. For other things, you’ll have to build a sysext.

Generally we’re interested in collecting use cases that Flatpak doesn’t cover currently. One of the goals for this initiative is finding both short-term workarounds and long-term solutions for those cases.

Please add such use cases to the relevant section in the Hedgedoc .

Any other known limitations?

GNOME OS uses systemd-sysupdate for updating the system, which doesn’t yet support delta updates. This means you have to download a new 2GB image from scratch for every update, which might be an issue if you don’t have regular access to a fast internet connection.

The current installer is temporary, so it’s missing many features we’ll have in the real installer, and the UI isn’t very polished.

Anything else I should know before trying to install GNOME OS?

Update the device’s firmware, including the TPM’s firmware, before nuking the Windows install the computer came with (I’m speaking from experience)!

I tried it, but I’m having problems :(

Ask in the GNOME OS Matrix channel !

My first two books were written online using Pressbooks in a browser. A change in the company’s pricing model prompted me to migrate another edition of the second book to LaTeX. Many enjoyable hours were spent searching online for how to implement everything from the basics to special effects. After a year and a half a nearly finished book suddenly congealed.

Here’s what I’m using: Fedora’s TeX Live stack, Emacs (with AUCTeX and the memoir class), Evince, and the Citations flatpak, all on a GNOME desktop. The cover of the first book was done professionally by a friend. For the second book (first and second editions) I’ve used the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

For print on demand, Lulu.com. The company was founded by Bob Young, who (among other achievements) rejuvenated a local football team, coincidentally my dad’s (for nearly 80 years and counting). Lulu was one of the options recommended by Adam Hyde at the end of the Mallard book sprint hosted by Google. Our book didn’t get printed in time to take home, so  I uploaded it to Lulu and ordered a few copies with great results. My second book is also on Amazon’s KDP under another ISBN; I’m debating whether to do that again.

Does this all need to be done from GNOME? For me, yes. The short answer came from Richard Schwarting on the occasion of our Boston Summit road trip: “GNOME makes me happy.”

The long answer…
In my career working as a CAD designer in engineering, I’ve used various products by Autodesk (among others). I lived through the AutoCAD-MicroStation war of the 1990s on the side of MicroStation (using AutoCAD when necessary). MicroStation brought elegance to the battle, basing their PC and UNIX ports on their revolutionary new Mac interface. They produced a student version for Linux. After Windows 95 the war was over and mediocrity won.

Our first home computer was an SGI Indy, purchased right in the middle of that CAD war. Having experienced MicroStation on IRIX I can say it’s like running GNOME on a PC: elegant if not exquisite compared to the alternative.

For ten years I was the IT guy at a small engineering company. While carrying out my insidious plan of installing Linux servers and routers, I was able to indulge certain pastimes, building and testing XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs) and fledgling GNOME on Debian unstable/experimental. Through the SGI Linux effort I got to meet online acquaintances from Sweden, Mexico, and Germany in person at Ottawa Linux Symposium and Debconf .

At the peak of my IT endeavours, I was reading email in Evolution from OpenXchange Server on SuSE Enterprise Server while serving a Windows workstation network with Samba. When we were acquired by a much larger company, my Linux servers met with expedient demise as we were absorbed into their global Windows Server network. The IT department was regionalized and I was promoted back into the engineering side of things. It was after that I encountered the docs team.

These days I’m compelled to keep Windows in a Box on my GNOME desktop in order to run Autodesk software. It’s not unusual for me to grind my teeth while I’m working. A month ago a surprise hiatus in my day job was announced, giving me time to enjoy GNOME, finish the book, and write a blog post.

So yes, it has to be GNOME.

In 2004 I used LaTeX in XEmacs to write a magazine article that was ultimately published in the UK. This week, for old times’ sake, I installed XEmacs (no longer packaged for Fedora) on my desktop. This requires an EPEL 8 package on CentOS 9 in Boxes. It can be seen in the screenshot. The syntax highlighting is real but LaTeX-mode isn’t quite operational yet.

After some discussion about where to announce our Pride Month celebrations, I’ve decided it might be easiest to do it on my own blog. It’s a little more personal that way. And if I say something silly or out of turn, it’s on me.

Let me begin by trying to explain why Pride feels particularly important in the world of Free Software.

Free Software Is Inclusive

GNOME is a weird project. It’s not a household name, like Linux. Nor is it a shrinkwrapped brand, like Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. But it is a massive, collective software project that includes many different components under its umbrella.

What binds all these interconnected projects together if not a brand and not a singular BDFL technical vision? It is the founding principle and vision for the project: everyone should be allowed in. To use GNOME, to modify GNOME, and to collaborate on GNOME.

GNOME has more active threads of contribution than any one person could possibly follow and more active users than we could possibly count. So this simple mission of making a desktop that includes everyone is actually a lot harder than it seems. Will it run on a 14-year-old Chromebook? Perhaps that’s the only computer someone has access to. Is it translated into Farsi? Perhaps that’s the only language the user reads. “Everyone” is a lot of people — and the world is a big place.

Pride Is Inclusive

Far be it from me to equate the mission of an open source project with that of a worldwide civil rights movement. But Pride carries a very similar message: everyone is allowed in. Everyone should be allowed into a country or city or business. Everyone is allowed to be themselves.

I’m very fortunate. I live in Halifax. It is, as far as I can tell, the Gayest City in Canada. Year-round, the Pride flag hangs from our bridges, is painted on crosswalks, and fills storefront windows. The rainbow adorns backpacks, laptops, skateboards, cars, and checkout counters. On an individual level, the Pride flag is a symbol of safety: “I promise you’re safe with me.” On a societal level, it’s an invitation: “You are welcome here.”

I know that not everyone is this lucky.

Pride Is Not The Same Everywhere

Pride is a celebration of how far the community has come. The 1970s and 1980s feel far away and the decades-long fight for liberation (in countries where liberation has begun) provides us with the history and war stories we all benefit from today.

But GNOME is global. And for many in the global 2SLGBTQIA+ (queer) community, the war is ongoing. Or it’s barely even begun. In some countries, members of the community are shunned, silenced, ostracized, harmed, or killed. Most of us know someone who didn’t survive.

We also need to demonstrate support for everyone because no one is safe simply because they live in a city filled with rainbow flags. Many of us still struggle with our identity and our place in society, no matter where we live.

And so Pride is bittersweet: a celebration of the freedom Pride represents but also an awareness of the dangers that continue to exist.

A Request To The Foundation

While discussing Pride preparations, there was a simple request, addressing these dangers, from one queer Foundation Member: “We just want to know you have our back.”

To all GNOME’s queer users and contributors: absolutely, the Foundation has your back. Not just this June, but always.

May everyone enjoy a peaceful and joyful Pride Month!

(Special thanks to Laura Kramolis for her thoughtful feedback and guidance while writing this post.)

The first two weeks of my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) journey with GNOME Papers have been both exciting and productive. I had the opportunity to meet my mentors, discuss the project goals, and dive into my first major task: improving the way document mutex locks are handled in the codebase.

🤝 Mentor Meeting & Planning

We kicked off with a meeting to get to know each other and to discuss the open Merge Request 499 . The MR focuses on moving document mutex locks from the libview /shell layer down to the individual backends (DjVu, PDF, TIFF, Comics). We also outlined the remaining work and clarified how to approach it for the best results.

## Opaque Stuff

• the usual policy drafting work; thank you Allan for ensuring we’re on top of this
• moving some operational deadlines forward (“preponing”) was discussed but this hasn’t been confirmed yet
• a bunch of tactical paperwork minutiae I’ll be very happy to see completed

## Safety

I published a post this week entitled On Safety . I won’t revisit it here in the Foundation Report but it is an important topic and I encourage you to go read it. Thank you to Allan Day for his thoughtful and patient editing.

## Pride

On a much happier note, we’ve begun celebrating Pride Month a little early! You may see some coloured flags on GNOME’s social media accounts and Jakub Steiner has produced some lovely Pride backgrounds. You can find the source in Design / wallpaper-assets / pride and you can get the high-res renders from the GNOME-48 branch of GNOME / gnome-backgrounds . Low-res previews below. Thanks to everyone who pitched in this year to help us celebrate Pride together.

## Designers

Speaking of The Designers, I got to attend their regular meeting this week. It was a pleasure to see just how committed everyone is to resolving the eternal tension of form, function, and performance. What might seem like a trivial decision on the surface (the performance of window drop-shadows, in this case) hides plenty of nuance, once you start digging. The need for performance isn’t arbitrary: a freie desktop needs to support older machines if we want to be the destination for those whose hardware had been abandoned by manufacturers and those who can’t afford to buy the fanciest gadget every 5 years. I enjoyed my time as a fly on the wall until Firefox crashed and wouldn’t restart.

Part of my meeting with the designers was selfish. The Foundation will need their help to revisit the audiences for our fundraising efforts. I’m actually looking forward to a little bit of pairing time with some of them, if they’ll let me.

## Fundraising

Rosanna and I sat down to drill through a mountain of spreadsheets and formulate a simplified picture of the Foundation’s finances — that “round to the nearest $100” napkin non-accounting that’s useful for visualization but not much else. I’m really grateful for the time Rosanna spent with me; it gave me a much better picture of where we stand, month on month, year on year.

We need these cartoony visuals so we can start painting a fundraising picture for ourselves. I’ve been told by many people “don’t make any promises!” And I am not promising anything in particular. At this stage, we’re just sweeping the floor and sketching out our strategy.

## End of 10

We’ve assembled a small Promo Team to coordinate with the End of 10 core team and the KDE folks. If you would like to be a part of this, shout at me or Sri. If you want to get involved more generally, jump into #endof10-en:kde.org .

I’ve already pitched to the local hacker community here in Halifax that we should put on a repair cafe some weekend. Step One? Find a cheap venue so none of us are paying out-of-pocket. We have a gorgeous public library here that hosts community events for free. Maybe your city does, too?

## GTD

We’ve made some great progress with the new Staff project wall and the Foundation-wide “Staff Ops” calendar. The new Foundation Handbook keeps plodding along, though I will admit it’s still a disorganized dumping ground for links I wish I had when I started. Baby steps.

## Nextcloud / OnlyOffice

Speaking of tooling, we have had repeated issues with data loss in OnlyOffice and it’s been decided to shut it down for now. If you are using Nextcloud for office files, your best option is to set up a mount in Nautilus (by adding ‘you@cloud.gnome.org/remote.php/dav’ to Online Accounts) and work on them locally.

If the lack of collaborative office tools is a big issue, we can revisit this. If you have collaboration requirements, please document them in the Multiplayer Office Files HedgeDoc. Thanks!

## Vaultwarden

We threw around a few suggestions for better group passwords across the Foundation. Somewhat unfortunately, we can’t lean on Nextcloud for this, as their “share” password feature doesn’t actually allow sharing groups of passwords yet.

For the time-being, it looks like Vaultwarden is our most likely candidate. Commercial Bitwarden was considered, but we can’t guarantee we wouldn’t rely on non-free features and passwords are too big a deal to find ourselves accidentally relying on proprietary software.

## Treasurer

We are still on the hunt for a solid Treasurer. The clock is ticking now, so if you know of anyone who might be appropriate, do reach out! I’m happy to speak to them over the weekend, if it will help, though they would need to have a conversation with Board members early next week, as it’s not me who decides who the Treasurer will be.

## Digital Wellbeing

We are looking at adding some additional development capacity to the Digital Wellbeing work to ensure it’s delivered on time. If you’re keen on a bit of Calm Computing and family-focused frontend work, please keep an eye out for the job posting and/or poke us in #foundation:gnome.org .

## UN Open Source Week

Looking to the future a bit, it’s UN Open Source Week in NYC, starting June 16th. I’m considering going if I can find a couch to crash on. If you’re planning to be in NYC that week, let me know!

See you next week!

When Signal introduced Stories , I didn't understand why. To me, Signal is all about giving as little information to as few people as possible but still being able to have a social life.

I didn't use any app that had stories. Only a few friends published Instagram stories, and many more followed public stories. I thought of stories as "broadcast content to as many people as possible," which is the opposite of what Signal is about for me.

It turns out I was wrong. Signal lets you curate who can see your stories. By default, all your contacts can see your stories, but you can also create smaller circles of people who will see them, or you can create stories from existing Signal groups.

Since I've realized that social media like Mastodon affect me more (negatively) than I thought , I've significantly reduced what I read and publish there. But I still want to share happy moments with friends. So, I gave Signal stories a go, and it has been more fun and useful than I thought.

When I publish a story on Signal, I know who will read it. It's not for the public, but it's for friends. I can publish more personal things, and people reply more genuinely. Friends ask where I am or how I'm doing at the moment. We listen to each other. And, to my great satisfaction, a few friends have started publishing stories since I started!

I also publish different things on Signal stories than on Mastodon. On Mastodon, I shared thoughts or, let's be honest, hot takes. On Signal, I share moments . I share what I do and experience, not necessarily what I think.

The UX is still a bit clunky, stories feel poorly integrated into Signal, and I don't understand why Signal broadcasts stories to your whole address book by default . But I enjoy having a place where I can share privately and spontaneously what I'm doing with a short list of people I trust and care about.

[!info] Signal is good tech, help them

If you've never tried Signal stories, I strongly encourage you to do so. If you use Signal and can afford it, consider supporting them financially ; they deserve it.

Keep up the good work, Signal. You're an excellent app and a great nonprofit, and I wish more organizations took inspiration from you.

• J. unwell in the night, feeling groggy. Sync with Dave, important partner call.
• Really excited to announce the merger of Collabora Productivity and allotropia! and really looking forward to properly welcoming and unifying the teams after COOL days
  
• Published the next strip around whether you focus on the process, or getting results:
  
• Call with Till & Thorsten, caught the end of our sales team call. Sync with Philippe. What a day!

As you may be aware, the entire GNOME community has been on the receiving end of a coordinated harassment campaign for the past year. All GNOME users and contributors with a public profile, and those active on Matrix, are being harassed.

I want to share my personal perspective on this, as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. There are some things that need to be said about these events, and I want to provide some reassurance for community members.

People At Risk

It is important for us to recognize that there are members of our community who are particularly at risk from the recent harassment campaign. Here, I am specifically referring to those people for whom this kind of harassment poses a genuine physical threat. The harassment frequently takes the form of anti-LGBTQIA+ (most frequently anti-trans), racist, misogynist, anti-semitic, and anti-muslim messages.

Individual targets of the harassment have included Staff members, Board members, Foundation members, and users. Our community includes people living under oppressive, authoritarian regimes. It includes people in war zones. It includes refugees. These people are all acutely at risk .

Please know that if you belong to one of these groups, you are always welcome in the GNOME community. We will do everything we can to ensure your safety in our community. We will not tolerate threats to your safety.

Psychological Harm

In addition to risk of physical harm, one component of this coordinated harassment campaign is the use of disturbing images, intending to cause psychological harm. The attackers’ very possession of these images is an international crime.

These attacks have been stopped on Discourse, our forum tool. The GNOME moderation team is actively engaged with the Matrix moderation team to reduce (and ultimately eliminate) users’ exposure to these images on the Matrix protocol.

If you have received one of these images, your best course of action is to email abuse@matrix.org . Specific, actionable advice is provided in The GNOME Handbook’s Matrix: Staying Safe section.

My Personal Experience

I was quite surprised to witness — and then find myself on the receiving end of — this harassment campaign when I began my new role with the GNOME Foundation. Because I’m a relatively new community member, I want to discuss my experience in case it is helpful to anyone else.

The first time I was on the receiving end of one of these images, my response was to go to my partner and say, “I’m feeling sick and anxious. I really need a hug.” This was also my response to the first few harassment messages I received. I was advised by other staff members not to respond to the people sending these messages of harassment. I’m glad I took their advice. Engaging will not help.

I have tried on many occasions to have compassion for those instigating and carrying out the harassment. They are clearly misguided — and not well. I have spent many years cultivating compassion but I still find myself struggling with this. Often thinking of the attackers leaves me feeling angry instead of compassionate.

If I catch myself directing angry thoughts toward those people carrying out the harassment campaign, I instead try my best to direct compassion toward those who are suffering because of it: the community. It is easy to feel compassion for the victim and if I focus my attention on the people who continue to work tirelessly on GNOME in spite of these attacks, I always end up with a smile on my face.

If you are feeling angry or frustrated, perhaps this approach will help you, too.

Commitment

Not every safety violation is created equal. Trolling and flame wars require a stern conversation — and perhaps moderation. A Code of Conduct violation necessitates the involvement of the Code of Conduct Committee — and perhaps the Board. Crimes demand the engagement of lawyers and law enforcement.

Of the harassment campaign I have heard the following euphemisms:

• “The spam.”
• “They are bullies.”
• “These people trolling us.”
• “These people seem like jerks.”
• “An annoying technical issue with federated protocols.”

They are not simply “bullies”. Their actions do not constitute “trolling”. These are crimes.

It is my commitment to you as members of this community that the Foundation will pursue the most appropriate course of action whenever your safety is violated, to the degree it is violated. This is part of why the Foundation exists: an incorporated entity can engage other organizations in more significant ways than any one person can.

The Foundation stands with you.