Back in 2019, we undertook a radical overhaul of how GNOME app icons work. The old Tango-era style required drawing up to seven separate sizes per icon and a truckload of detail. A task so demanding that only a handful of people could do it. The "new" style is geometric, colorful, and most importantly — achievable . But redesigning the system was just the first step. We needed to actually get better icons into the hands of app developers, as those should be in control of their brand identity. That's where app-icon-requests came in.

As of today, the project has received over a hundred icon requests. Each one represents a collaboration between a designer and a developer, and a small but visible improvement to the Linux desktop.

How It Works

Ideally if a project needs a quick turnaround and direct control over the result, the best approach remains doing it in-house or commission a designer.

But if you're not in a rush, and aim to be a well designed GNOME app in particular, you can leverage the idle time of various GNOME designers. The process is simple. If you're building an app that follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines , you can open an icon request . A designer from the community picks up the issue, starts sketching ideas, and works with you until the icon is ready to ship. If your app is part of GNOME Circle or is aiming to join, you're far more likely to get a designer's attention quickly.

The sketching phase is where the real creative work happens. Finding the right metaphor for what an app does, expressed in a simple geometric shape. It's the part I enjoy most, and why I've been sharing my Sketch Friday process on Mastodon for over two years now ( part 2 ). But the project isn't about one person's sketches. It's a team effort, and the more designers join, the faster the backlog shrinks.

Highlights

Here are a few of the icons that came through the pipeline. Each started as a GitLab issue and ended up as pixels on someone's desktop.

Alpaca , an AI chat client, went through several rounds of sketching to find just the right llama. Bazaar , an alternative to GNOME Software, took eight months and 16 comments to go from a shopping basket concept through a price tag to the final market stall. Millisecond , a system tuning tool for low-latency audio, needed several rounds to land on the right combination of stopwatch and waveform. Field Monitor shows how multiple iterations narrow down the concept. And Exhibit , the 3D model viewer, is one of my personal favorites.

You can browse all 127 completed icons to see the full range — from core GNOME apps to niche tools on Flathub .

Papers: From Sketch to Ship

To give a sense of what the process looks like up close, here's Papers — the GNOME document viewer. The challenge was finding an icon that says "documents" without being yet another generic file icon.

The early sketches explored different angles — a magnifying glass over stacked pages, reading glasses resting on a document. The final icon kept the reading glasses and the stack of colorful papers, giving it personality while staying true to what the app does. The whole thing played out in the GitLab issue , with the developer and designer going back and forth until both were happy.

While the new icon style is far easier to execute than the old high-detail GNOME icons, that doesn't mean every icon is quick. The hard part was never pushing pixels — it's nailing the metaphor. The icon needs to make sense to a new user at a glance, sit well next to dozens of other icons, and still feel like this app to the person who built it. Getting that right is a conversation between the designer's aesthetic judgment and the maintainer's sense of identity and purpose, and sometimes that conversation takes a while.

Bazaar is a good example.

The app was already shipping with the price tag icon when Tobias Bernard — who reviews apps for GNOME Circle — identified its shortcomings and restarted the process. That kind of quality gate is easy to understate, but it's a big part of why GNOME apps look as consistent as they do. Tobias is also a prolific icon designer himself, frequently contributing icons to key projects across the ecosystem. In this case, the sketches went from a shopping basket through the price tag to a market stall with an awning — a proper bazaar. Sixteen comments and eight months later, the icon shipped.

Get Involved

There are currently 20 open icon requests waiting for a designer. Recent ones like Kotoba (a Japanese dictionary), Simba (a Samba manager), and Slop Finder haven't had much activity yet and could use a designer's attention.

If you're a designer, or want to become one, this is a great place to start contributing to Free software. The GNOME icon style was specifically designed to be approachable: bold shapes, a defined color palette, clear guidelines . Tools like Icon Preview and Icon Library make the workflow smooth. Pick a request, start with a pencil sketch on paper, and iterate from there. There's also a dedicated Matrix room #appicondesign:gnome.org where icon work is discussed — it's invite-only due to spam, but feel free to poke me in #gnome-design or #gnome for an invitation. If you're new to Matrix, the GNOME Handbook explains how to get set up.

If you're an app developer , don't despair shipping with a placeholder icon. Follow the HIG , open a request , and a designer will help you out. If you're targeting GNOME Circle , a proper icon is part of the deal anyway.

A good icon is one of those small things that makes an app feel real — finished, polished, worth installing. Now that we actually have a place to browse apps, an app icon is either the fastest way to grab attention or make people skip. If you've got some design chops and a few hours to spare, pick an issue and start sketching.

Need a Fast Track?

If you need a faster turnaround or just want to work with someone who's been helping out with GNOME's visual identity for as long as I can remember — Hylke Bons offers app icon design for open source projects through his studio, Planet Peanut. Hylke has been a core contributor to GNOME's icon work for well over a decade. You'll be in great hands.

His service has a great freebie for FOSS projects — funded by community sponsors. You get three sketches to choose from, a final SVG, and a symbolic variant, all following the GNOME icon guidelines. If your project uses an OSI-approved license and is on Flathub, you're eligible. Consider sponsoring his work if you can — even a small amount helps keep the pipeline going.

Previously , Previously .

This winter I was bored and needed something new, so I spent lots of my free time disassembling and analysing Monster World IV for the SEGA Mega Drive. More specifically, I looked at the 2008 Virtual Console revision of the game, which adds an English translation to the original 1994 release.

My long term goal would be to fully disassemble and analyse the game, port it to C or Rust as I do, and then port it to the Game Boy Advance. I don’t have a specific reason to do that, I just think it’s a charming game from a dated but charming series, and I think the Monaster World series would be a perfect fit on the Game Boy Advance. Since a long time, I also wanted to experiment with disassembling or decompiling code, understanding what doing so implies, understanding how retro computing systems work, and understanding the inner workings of a game I enjoy. Also, there is not publicly available disassembly of this game as far as I know.

As Spring is coming, I sense my focus shifting to other projets, but I don’t want this work to be gone forever and for everyone, especially not for future me. Hence, I decided to publish what I have here, so I can come back to it later or so it can benefit someone else.

First, here is the Ghidra project archive . It’s the first time I used Ghidra and I’m certain I did plenty of things wrong, feedback is happily welcome! While I tried to rename things as my understanding of the code grew, it is still quite a mess of clashing name conventions, and I’m certain I got plenty of things wrong.

Then, here is the Rust-written data extractor . It documents how some systems work, both as code and actual documentation. It mainly extracts and documents graphics and their compression methods, glyphs and their compression methods, character encodings, and dialog scripts. Similarly, I’m not a Rust expert, I did my best but I’m certain there is area for improvement, and everything was constantly changing anyway.

There is more information that isn’t documented and is just floating in my head, such as how the entity system works, but I yet have to refine my understanding of it. Same goes for the optimimzations allowed by coding in assembly, such as using specific registers for commonly used arguments. Hopefully I will come back to this project and complete it, at least when it comes to disassembling and documenting the game’s code.

Red Hat just published the Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 .

Accessibility Conformance Reports basically document how our software measures up against accessibility standards like WCAG and Section 508 . Since RHEL 10 is built on GNOME 47, this report is a good look at how our stack handles various accessibility things from screen readers to keyboard navigation.

Getting a desktop environment to meet these requirements is a huge task and it’s only possible because of the work done by our community in projects like: Orca, GTK, Libadwaita, Mutter, GNOME Shell, core apps, etc…

Kudos to everyone in the GNOME project that cares about improving accessibility . We all know there’s a long way to go before desktop computing is fully accessible to everyone, but we are surely working on that.

If you’re curious about the state of accessibility in the 47 release or how these audits work, you can find the full PDF here .

Sometimes in my posts I need to show a screen recording. Videos can get heavy rapidly and take a lot of time to load.

I also write my posts in markdown which has syntax to include images:

![Alt text describing the image](path to the image)

Using that syntax for videos doesn't work though. Since html is valid markdown, it's possible to manually add <video> tags, but it's a bit more tedious.

It's also possible to use ffmpeg to convert a mp4 video into a looping animated AVIF. The command to do it is

$ ffmpeg -i demo.mp4 -loop 0 demo.avif

AVIF also compresses very well, without loosing too much detail.

$ ls -lh
total 1.8M
-rw-r--r--. 1 thib thib 566K Apr 11 09:26 typst-live-preview.avif
-rw-r--r--. 1 thib thib 1.2M Apr  8 22:02 typst-live-preview.mp4

The support for AVIF in browsers is excellent , sitting at more than 94% as of writing.

My only remaining gripe is that Astro chokes on AVIF images when trying to optimize images in Markdown posts. A workaround for it is to store the AVIFs as static assets so Astro doesn't try to optimize them.

This post attempts to explain how Huion tablet devices currently integrate into the desktop stack. I'll touch a bit on the Huion driver and the OpenTablet driver but primarily this explains the intended integration[1]. While I have access to some Huion devices and have seen reports from others, there are likely devices that are slightly different. Huion's vendor ID is also used by other devices (UCLogic and Gaomon) so this applies to those devices as well.

This post was written without AI support, so any errors are organic artisian hand-crafted ones. Enjoy.

The graphics tablet stack

First, a short overview of the ideal graphics tablet stack in current desktops. At the bottom is the physical device which contains a significant amount of firmware. That device provides something resembling the HID protocol over the wire (or bluetooth) to the kernel. The kernel typically handles this via the generic HID drivers [2] and provides us with an /dev/input/event evdev node, ideally one for the pen (and any other tool) and one for the pad (the buttons/rings/wheels/dials on the physical tablet). libinput then interprets the data from these event nodes, passes them on to the compositor which then passes them via Wayland to the client. Here's a simplified illustration of this:

Unlike the X11 api, libinput's API works both per-tablet and per-tool basis. In other words, when you plug in a tablet you get a libinput device that has a tablet tool capability and (optionally) a tablet pad capability. But the tool will only show up once you bring it into proximity. Wacom tools have sufficient identifiers that we can a) know what tool it is and b) get a unique serial number for that particular device. This means you can, if you wanted to, track your physical tool as it is used on multiple devices. No-one [3] does this but it's possible. More interesting is that because of this you can also configure the tools individually, different pressure curves, etc. This was possible with the xf86-input-wacom driver in X but only with some extra configuration, libinput provides/requires this as the default behaviour.

The most prominent case for this is the eraser which is present on virtually all pen-like tools though some will have an eraser at the tail end and others (the numerically vast majority) will have it hardcoded on one of the buttons. Changing to eraser mode will create a new tool (the eraser) and bring it into proximity - that eraser tool is logically separate from the pen tool and can thus be configured differently. [4]

Another effect of this per-tool behaviour is also that we know exactly what a tool can do. If you use two different styli with different capabilities (e.g. one with tilt and 2 buttons, one without tilt and 3 buttons), they will have the right bits set. This requires libwacom - a library that tells us, simply: any tool with id 0x1234 has N buttons and capabilities A, B and C. libwacom is just a bunch of static text files with a C library wrapped around those. Without libwacom, we cannot know what any individual tool can do - the firmware and kernel always expose the capability set of all tools that can be used on any particular tablet. For example: wacom's devices support an airbrush tool so any tablet plugged in will announce the capabilities for an airbrush even though >99% of users will never use an airbrush [5].

The compositor then takes the libinput events, modifies them (e.g. pressure curve handling is done by the compositor) and passes them via the Wayland protocol to the client. That protocol is a pretty close mirror of the libinput API so it works mostly the same. From then on, the rest is up to the application/toolkit.

Notably, libinput is a hardware abstraction layer and conversion of hardware events into others is generally left to the compositor. IOW if you want a button to generate a key event, that's done either in the compositor or in the application/toolkit. But the current versions of libinput and the Wayland protocol do support all hardware features we're currently aware of: the various stylus types (including Wacom's lens cursor and mouse-like "puck" devices) and buttons, rings, wheels/dials, and touchstrips on pads. We even support the rather once-off Dell Canvas Totem device.

Huion devices

Huion's devices are HID compatible which means they "work" out of the box but they come in two different modes, let's call them firmware mode and tablet mode. Each tablet device pretends to be three HID devices on the wire and depending on the mode some of those devices won't send events.

Firmware mode

This is the default mode after plugging the device in. Two of the HID devices exposed look like a tablet stylus and a keyboard. The tablet stylus is usually correct (enough) to work OOTB with the generic kernel drivers, it exports the buttons, pressure, tilt, etc. The buttons and strips/wheels/dials on the tablet are configured to send key events. For example, the Inspiroy 2S I have sends b/i/e/Ctrl+S/space/Ctrl+Alt+z for the buttons and the roller wheel sends Ctrl-/Ctrl= depending on direction. The latter are often interpreted as zoom in/out so hooray, things work OOTB. Other Huion devices have similar bindings, there is quite some overlap but not all devices have exactly the same key assignments for each button. It does of course get a lot more interesting when you want a button to do something different - you need to remap the key event (ideally without messing up your key map lest you need to type an 'e' later).

The userspace part is effectively the same, so here's a simplified illustration of what happens in kernel land:

Any vendor-specific data is discarded by the kernel (but in this mode that HID device doesn't send events anyway).

Tablet mode

If you read a special USB string descriptor from the English language ID, the device switches into tablet mode. Once in tablet mode, the HID tablet stylus and keyboard devices will stop sending events and instead all events from the device are sent via the third HID device which consists of a single vendor-specific report descriptor (read: 11 bytes of "here be magic"). Those bits represent the various features on the device, including the stylus features and all pad features as buttons/wheels/rings/strips (and not key events!). This mode is the one we want to handle the tablet properly. The kernel's hid-uclogic driver switches into tablet mode for supported devices, in userspace you can use e.g. huion-switcher . The device cannot be switched back to firmware mode but will return to firmware mode once unplugged.

Once we have the device in tablet mode, we can get true tablet data and pass it on through our intended desktop stack. Alas, like ogres there are layers.

hid-uclogic and udev-hid-bpf

Historically and thanks in large parts to the now-discontinued digimend project , the hid-uclogic kernel driver did do the switching into tablet mode, followed by report descriptor mangling (inside the kernel) so that the resulting devices can be handled by the generic HID drivers. The more modern approach we are pushing for is to use udev-hid-bpf which is quite a bit easer to develop for. But both do effectively the same thing: they overlay the vendor-specific data with a normal HID report descriptor so that the incoming data can be handled by the generic HID kernel drivers. This will look like this:

Notable here: the stylus and keyboard may still exist and get event nodes but never send events[6] but the uclogic/bpf-enabled device will be proper stylus/pad event nodes that can be handled by libinput (and thus the rest), with raw hardware data where buttons are buttons.

Challenges

Because in true manager speak we don't have problems, just challenges. And oh boy, we collect challenges as if we'd be organising the olypmics.

hid-uclogic and libinput

First and probably most embarrassing is that hid-uclogic has a different way of exposing event nodes than what libinput expects. This is largely my fault for having focused on Wacom devices and internalized their behaviour for long years. The hid-uclogic driver exports the wheels and strips on separate event nodes - libinput doesn't handle this correctly (or at all). That'd be fixable but the compositors also don't really expect this so there's a bit more work involved but the immediate effect is that those wheels/strips will likely be ignored and not work correctly. Buttons and pens work.

udev-hid-bpf and huion-switcher

hid-uclogic being a kernel driver has access to the underlying USB device. The HID-BPF hooks in the kernel currently do not, so we cannot switch the device into tablet mode from a BPF, we need it in tablet mode already. This means a userspace tool (read: huion-switcher) triggered via udev on plug-in and before the udev-hid-bpf udev rules trigger. Not a problem but it's one more moving piece that needs to be present (but boy, does this feel like the unix way...).

Huion's precious product IDs

By far the most annoying part about anything Huion is that until relatively recently (I don't have a date but maybe until 2 years ago) all of Huion's devices shared the same few USB product IDs. For most of these devices we worked around it by matching on device names but there were devices that had the same product id and device name. At some point libwacom and the kernel and huion-switcher had to implement firmware ID extraction and matching so we could differ between devices with the same 0256:006d usb IDs. Luckily this seems to be in the past now with modern devices now getting new PIDs for each individual device. But if you have an older device, expect difficulties and, worse, things to potentially break after firmware updates when/if the firmware identification string changes. udev-hid-bpf (and uclogic) rely on the firmware strings to identify the device correctly.

udev-hid-bpf and hid-uclogic

Because we have a changeover from the hid-uclogic kernel driver to the udev-hid-bpf files there are rough edges on "where does this device go". The general rule is now: if it's not a shared product ID (see above) it should go into udev-hid-bpf and not the uclogic driver. Easier to maintain, much more fire-and-forget. Devices already supported by udev-hid-bpf will remain there, we won't implement BPFs for those (older) devices, doubly so because of the aforementioned libinput difficulties with some hid-uclogic features.

Reverse engineering required

The newer tablets are always slightly different so we basically need to reverse-engineer each tablet to get it working. That's common enough for any device but we do rely on volunteers to do this. Mind you, the udev-hid-bpf approach is much simpler than doing it in the kernel, much of it is now copy-paste and I've even had quite some success to get e.g. Claude Code to spit out a 90% correct BPF on its first try. At least the advantage of our approach to change the report descriptor means once it's done it's done forever, there is no maintenance required because it's a static array of bytes that doesn't ever change.

Plumbing support into userspace

Because we're abstracting the hardware, userspace needs to be fully plumbed. This was a problem last year for example when we (slowly) got support for relative wheels into libinput, then wayland, then the compositors, then the toolkits to make it available to the applications (of which I think none so far use the wheels). Depending on how fast your distribution moves, this may mean that support is months and years off even when everything has been implemented. On the plus side these new features tend to only appear once every few years. Nonetheless, it's not hard to see why the "just sent Ctrl=, that'll do" approach is preferred by many users over "probably everything will work in 2027, I'm sure".

So, what stylus is this?

A currently unsolved problem is the lack of tool IDs on all Huion tools. We cannot know if the tool used is the two-button + eraser PW600L or the three-button-one-is-an-eraser-button PW600S or the two-button PW550 (I don't know if it's really 2 buttons or 1 button + eraser button). We always had this problem with e.g. the now quite old Wacom Bamboo devices but those pens all had the same functionality so it just didn't matter. It would matter less if the various pens would only work on the device they ship with but it's apparently quite possible to use a 3 button pen on a tablet that shipped with a 2 button pen OOTB. This is not difficult to solve (pretend to support all possible buttons on all tools) but it's frustrating because it removes a bunch of UI niceties that we've had for years - such as the pen settings only showing buttons that actually existed. Anyway, a problem currently in the "how I wish there was time" basket.

Summary

Overall, we are in an ok state but not as good as we are for Wacom devices. The lack of tool IDs is the only thing not fixable without Huion changing the hardware[7]. The delay between a new device release and driver support is really just dependent on one motivated person reverse-engineering it (our BPFs can work across kernel versions and you can literally download them from a successful CI pipeline ). The hid-uclogic split should become less painful over time and the same as the devices with shared USB product IDs age into landfill and even more so if libinput gains support for the separate event nodes for wheels/strips/... (there is currently no plan and I'm somewhat questioning whether anyone really cares). But other than that our main feature gap is really the ability for much more flexible configuration of buttons/wheels/... in all compositors - having that would likely make the requirement for OpenTabletDriver and the Huion tablet disappear.

OpenTabletDriver and Huion's own driver

The final topic here: what about the existing non-kernel drivers?

Both of these are userspace HID input drivers which all use the same approach: read from a /dev/hidraw node, create a uinput device and pass events back. On the plus side this means you can do literally anything that the input subsystem supports, at the cost of a context switch for every input event. Again, a diagram on how this looks like (mostly) below userspace:

Note how the kernel's HID devices are not exercised here at all because we parse the vendor report, create our own custom (separate) uinput device(s) and then basically re-implement the HID to evdev event mapping. This allows for great flexibility (and control, hence the vendor drivers are shipped this way) because any remapping can be done before you hit uinput. I don't immediately know whether OpenTabletDriver switches to firmware mode or maps the tablet mode but architecturally it doesn't make much difference.

From a security perspective: having a userspace driver means you either need to run that driver daemon as root or (in the case of OpenTabletDriver at least) you need to allow uaccess to /dev/uinput , usually via udev rules. Once those are installed , anything can create uinput devices, which is a risk but how much is up for interpretation.

[1] As is so often the case, even the intended state does not necessarily spark joy
[2] Again, we're talking about the intended case here...
[3] fsvo "no-one"
[4] The xf86-input-wacom driver always initialises a separate eraser tool even if you never press that button
[5] For historical reasons those are also multiplexed so getting ABS_Z on a device has different meanings depending on the tool currently in proximity
[6] In our udev-hid-bpf BPFs we hide those devices so you really only get the correct event nodes, I'm not immediately sure what hid-uclogic does
[7] At which point Pandora will once again open the box because most of the stack is not yet ready for non-Wacom tool ids

After successfully moving this blog to Zola , doubts got suppressed and I couldn't resist porting the GNOME Release Notes too.

The Proof

The blog port worked better than expected. Fighting CI github action was where most enthusiasm was lost. The real test though was whether Zola could handle a site way more important than my little blog — one hosting release notes for GNOME.

What Changed

The main work was porting the templates from Liquid to Tera, the same exercise as the blog. That included structural change to shift releases from Jekyll pages to proper Zola posts . This enabled two things that weren't possible before:

• RSS feed — With releases as posts, generating a feed is native. Something I was planning to do in the Jekyll world … but there were roadblocks .
• The archive — Old release notes going back to GNOME 2.x have been properly ported over. They're now part of the navigable archive instead of lost to the ages. I'm afraid it's quite a cringe town if you hold nostalgic ideas how amazing things were back in the day.

The Payoff

The site now has a working RSS feed — years of broken promises finally fulfilled. The full archive from GNOME 2.x through 50 is available. And perhaps best of all: zero dependency management and supporting people who "just want to write a bit of markdown". Just a single binary.

I'd say it's another success story and if I were a Jekyll project in the websites team space , I'd start to worry.

Over the past week, I’ve been building goblin , a linter specifically designed for GObject-based C codebases.

If you know Rust’s clippy or Go’s go vet , think of goblin as the same thing for GObject/GLib.

Why this exists

A large part of the Linux desktop stack (GTK, Mutter, Pango, NetworkManager) is built on GObject. These projects have evolved over decades and carry a lot of patterns that predate newer GLib helpers, are easy to misuse, or encode subtle lifecycle invariants that nothing verifies.

This leads to issues like missing dispose / finalize / constructed chain-ups (memory leaks or undefined behavior), incorrect property definitions, uninitialized GError* variables, or function declarations with no implementation.

These aren’t theoretical. This GTK merge request recently fixed several missing chain-ups in example code.

Despite this, the C ecosystem lacks a linter that understands GObject semantics. goblin exists to close that gap.

What goblin checks

goblin ships with 35 rules across different categories:

• Correctness : Real bugs like non-canonical property names, uninitialized GError* , missing PROP_0
• Suspicious : Likely mistakes like missing implementations or redundant NULL checks
• Style : Idiomatic GLib usage ( g_strcmp0 , g_str_equal() )
• Complexity : Suggests modern helpers ( g_autoptr , g_clear_* , g_set_str() )
• Performance : Optimizations like G_PARAM_STATIC_STRINGS or g_object_notify_by_pspec()
• Pedantic : Consistency checks (macro semicolons, matching declare/define pairs)

23 out of 35 rules are auto-fixable. You should apply fixes one rule at a time to review the changes:

goblin --fix --only use_g_strcmp0
goblin --fix --only use_clear_functions

CI/CD Integration

goblin fits into existing pipelines.

GitHub Actions

- name: Run goblin
  run: goblin --format sarif > goblin.sarif

- name: Upload SARIF results
  uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
  with:
    sarif_file: goblin.sarif

Results show up in the Security tab under "Code scanning" and inline on pull requests.

GitLab CI

goblin:
  image: ghcr.io/bilelmoussaoui/goblin:latest
  script:
    - goblin --format sarif > goblin.sarif
  artifacts:
    reports:
      sast: goblin.sarif

Results appear inline in merge requests.

Configuration

Rules default to warn , and can be tuned via goblin.toml :

min_glib_version = "2.40"  # Auto-disable rules for newer versions

[rules]
g_param_spec_static_name_canonical = "error"  # Make critical
use_g_strcmp0 = "warn"  # Keep as warning
use_g_autoptr_inline_cleanup = "ignore"  # Disable

# Per-rule ignore patterns
missing_implementation = { level = "error", ignore = ["src/backends/**"] }

You can adopt it gradually without fixing everything at once.

Try it

# Run via container
podman run --rm -v "$PWD:/workspace:Z" ghcr.io/bilelmoussaoui/goblin:latest

# Install locally
cargo install --git https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/goblin goblin

# Usage
goblin              # Lint current directory
goblin --fix        # Apply automatic fixes
goblin --list-rules # Inspect available rules

The project is early, so feedback is especially valuable (false positives, missing checks, workflow issues, etc.).

When a container crashes, it can be for several reasons. Sometimes the log won't tell you much about why the container crashed, and you can't get a shell into that container because... it has already crashed. It turns out that kubectl debug can let you do exactly that.

I was trying to ship Helfertool on our Kubernetes cluster. The firs step was to get it to work locally in my Minikube. The container I was deploying kept crashing, with an error message that put me on the right track: Cannot write to log directory. Exiting.

The container expected me to mount a volume on /log so it could write logs, which I did. I wanted to run a quick test from within the container to see if I could create a file in that directory. But when your container has already crashed you can't get a shell into it.

My better informed colleague Quentin told me about kubectl debug , a command that lets me create a copy of the crashing container but with a different COMMAND .

So instead of running its normal program, I can ask the container to run sh with the following command

$ kubectl debug mypod -it \
    --copy-to=mypod-debug \
    --container=my-pods-image \
    -- sh

And just like that I have shell inside a similar container. Using this trick I could confirm that I can't touch a file in that /log directory because it belongs to root while my container is running unprivileged.

That's a great trick to troubleshoot from within a crashing container!

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 03 to April 10.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

James Westman reports

blueprint-compiler is now available on PyPI. You can install it with pip install blueprint-compiler .

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Hieroglyphic ↗

Find LaTeX symbols

FineFindus reports

Hieroglyphic 2.3 is out now. Thanks to the exciting work done by Bnyro, Hieroglyphic can now also recognize Typst symbols (a modern alternative to LaTeX). Hardware-acceleration will now be preferred, when available, reducing power-consumption.

Download the latest version from FlatHub .

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi says

Amberol 2026.1 is out, using the GNOME 50 run time! This new release fixes a few issues when it comes to loading music, and has some small quality of life improvements in the UI, like: a more consistent visibility of the playlist panel when adding songs or searching; using the shortcuts dialog from libadwaita; and being able to open the file manager in the folder containing the current song. You can get Amberol on Flathub .

Third Party Projects

Alexander Vanhee says

A new version of Bazaar is out now. It features the ability to filter search results via a new popover and reworks the add-ons dialog to include a page that shows more information about a specific entry. If you try to open an add-on via the AppStream scheme, it will now display this page, which is useful when you want to redirect users to install an add-on from within your app.

Also, please take a look at the statistics dialog — it now features a cool gradient.

Check it out on Flathub

dabrain34 reports

GstPipelineStudio 0.5.1 is out now. It’s a great pleasure to announce this new version allowing to deal with DOT files directly. Check the project web page for more information or the following blog post for more details about the release.

Anton Isaiev announces

RustConn (connection manager for SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, Telnet, Serial, Kubernetes, MOSH, and Zero Trust protocols)

Versions 0.10.9–0.10.14 landed with a solid round of usability, security, and performance work.

Staying connected got easier. If an SSH session drops unexpectedly, RustConn now polls the host and reconnects on its own as soon as it’s back. Wake-on-LAN works the same way: send the magic packet and RustConn connects automatically once the machine boots. You can also right-click any connection to check if the host is online, and a new “Connect All” option opens every connection in a folder at once. For RDP there’s a Mouse Jiggler that keeps idle sessions alive.

Terminal Activity Monitor is a new per-session feature that watches for output activity or silence, which is handy for long-running jobs. You get notifications as tab icons, toasts, and desktop alerts when the window is in the background.

Security got a lot of attention. RDP now defaults to trust-on-first-use certificate validation instead of blindly accepting everything. Credentials for Bitwarden and 1Password are no longer visible in the process list. VNC passwords are zeroized on drop. Export files are written with owner-only permissions. Dangerous custom arguments are blocked for both VNC and FreeRDP viewers.

Hoop.dev joins as the 11th Zero Trust provider. There’s also a new custom SSH agent socket setting that lets Flatpak users connect through KeePassXC, Bitwarden, or GPG-based SSH agents, something the Flatpak sandbox previously made difficult.

Smoother on HiDPI and 4K. RDP frame rendering skips a 33 MB per-frame copy when the data is already in the right format. Highlight rules, search, and log sanitization patterns are compiled once instead of on every keystroke or terminal line.

GNOME HIG polish. Success notifications now use non-blocking toasts instead of modal dialogs. Sidebar context menus are native PopoverMenus with keyboard navigation and screen reader support. Translations completed for all 15 languages.

Project: https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn Flatpak: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.54 is out:

There’s now a notification when an app fails to start, the status bar can be extended via plugins, and the location quick toggle has a status page to set the maximum allowed accuracy.

On the compositor side we improved X11 support, making docked mode (aka convergence) with applications like emacs or ardour more fun to use.

The on screen keyboard Stevia now supports Japanese and Chinese input via UIM, has a new us+workman layout and automatic space handling can be disabled.

There’s more - see the full details here .

Documentation

Emmanuele Bassi announces

The GNOME User documentation project has been ported to use Meson for its configuration, build, and installation. The User documentation contains the desktop help and the system administration guide, and gets published on the user help website , as well as being available locally through the Help browser . The switch to Meson improved build times, and moved the tests and validation in the build system. There’s a whole new contribution guideline as well. If you want to help writing the GNOME documentation, join us in the Docs room on Matrix !

Shell Extensions

Weather O’Clock ↗

Display the current weather inside the pill next to the clock.

Cleo Menezes Jr. reports

Weather O’Clock 50 released with fluffier animations: smooth fades between loading, weather and offline states; instant temperature updates; first-fetch spinner; offline indicator; GNOME Shell 45–50 support; and various bug fixes.

Get it on GNOME Extensions

Follow development

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!