A long time ago we had Devhelp integrated in Builder. It got lost in the GTK 4 port because there was no GTK 4 version of Devhelp. Additionally, it didn’t handle the concept of SDKs at all. We went through great lengths in Builder to try to copy them around so libdevhelp could pi … | Continue reading
Since the inception of Builder, it has used $XDG_CACHE_DIR for many things like custom installation paths, flatpak-builder state directories, out-of-tree build directories, code indexes, and more. I finally got around to allowing for custom cache roots and now Builder will defaul … | Continue reading
A few people (and multi-billion dollar companies!) have asked for my response to the xz backdoor. The fwupd metadata that millions of people download every day is a 9.5MB XML file — which thankfully is very compressible. This used to be compressed as gzip by the LVFS, making it a … | Continue reading
So Fedora Workstation 40 Beta has just come out so I thought I share a bit about some of the things we are working on for Fedora Workstation currently and also major changes coming in from the community. Flatpak Flatpaks has been a key part of our strategy for desktop application … | Continue reading
Christian was looking at PGO and BOLT recently I figured I’d write down my notes from the discussions we had on how we’d go about making things faster on our stack, since I don’t have time or the resource to pursue those plans myself atm. First off let’s start with the basics, PG … | Continue reading
Another small feature update just in time for gnome 46. Subscribe via CLI Lets start with something that already went into version 3.1.4: you can subscribe to feeds via CLI now. The idea is that this is a building block for seamlessly subscribing to websites from within a browser … | Continue reading
My creative work is more aligned to GNOME cycles than years. Now that GNOME 46 is is out it’s a good time to look back at some of the larger things I did during those cycles. Fedora and Frame Pointers 2023 kicked off with quite a kerfuffle around frame pointers. Many people appea … | Continue reading
Decades ago, when you wanted to run debug builds for UI applications, things were incredibly slow. First you’d wait minutes for the application to present a window. Then wait tens of seconds for each frame to render. You were extremely lucky if Valgrind caught the issue while you … | Continue reading
We’ve had a lot of questions from people planning to attend this year’s edition of the Berlin Mini GUADEC from outside Berlin about where it’s going to happen, so they can book accommodation nearby. We have two good news on that front: First, we have secured (pending a few last o … | Continue reading
I did a little experimenting with BOLT today to optimize libraries post-link. I’m not an expert on it or anything, but it seems to allow you to reorder functions in your executable/library based on feedback from perf record and some special post-processing. You can merge multiple … | Continue reading
BPF Performance Tools author and all around profiling expert Brendan Gregg wrote a blog post that sums up what was in my Fedora Magazine article quite well. Though he has this to say on the topic of Fedora who made this ground breaking change and Ubuntu who followed along afterwa … | Continue reading
We hit a major milestones this week with the long worked on adoption of PipeWire Camera support finally starting to land! Not long ago Firefox was released with experimental PipeWire camera support thanks to the great work by Jan Grulich. Then this week OBS Studio shipped with Pi … | Continue reading
Well, another cycle has passed. This one was fairly slow, but nevertheless has a major new feature. Adaptive Dialogs The biggest feature this time is the new dialog widgetry. Traditionally, dialogs have been separate windows. While this approach generally works, we never figured … | Continue reading
After a busy month, a new Gameeky release is out. This new release comes with improved compatibility with other platforms and several usability additions and improvements. It’s no longer necessary to run terminal commands. The most noticeable change in release is the addition of … | Continue reading
Recently I was looking at a VTE performance issue so I added a bunch of Sysprof timing marks to be picked up by the profiler. I combined that with GTK frame timing information and GNOME Shell timing information because Sysprof will just do that for you. I noticed a curious thing … | Continue reading
Pika Backup is an app focused on backups of personal data. It’s internally based on BorgBackup and provides fast incremental backups. Last year, Pika Backup crossed the mark of 100,000 downloads on Flatub. These are numbers I couldn’t have imagined when submitting Pika Backup to … | Continue reading
First off, what the heck is Ptyxis? Ptyxis is the new name of what was formerly Prompt. The extremely nice people at Panic let me know they had a product that might be confused with Prompt and I agreed it could be confusing. Thankfully, their office is a few miles from me in Port … | Continue reading
Hi, I am happy to announce Cambalache’s Gtk4 port has a beta release! Version 0.17.2 features minors improvements and a brand new UI ported to Gtk 4! The port was easier than expected, still lots of changes as you can see here… 64 files changed, 2615 insertions(+), 2769 deletions … | Continue reading
(yes, you read that right: the ‘f’ is not capitalized anymore) This release doesn’t introduce groundbreaking new functionality. But there are quite a few quality of life improvements worth checking out. Marking all articles as read is now more predictable and can be undone. It ta … | Continue reading
After three months of development, Gameeky reaches its first public release. This project is the result of nearly fifteen years of experience contributing to education projects and mentoring young learners. I am happy to share it everyone! Although this project can still be consi … | Continue reading
In fwupd 1.9.12 and earlier we had the following auto-quit behavior: Auto-quit on idle after 2 hours, unless: Any thunderbolt controller, thunderbolt retimer or synaptics-mst devices exist. These devices are both super slow to query and also use battery power to query as you have … | Continue reading
Hello everyone! I am here to terrorize your calendar by dropping the dates for two back to back hackfests we are organizing in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki, Greece (who doesn’t like coming to Greece on work time, right?). May 27-29th we will be hosting the annual GStreamer … | Continue reading
I’ve authored an article recently for Fedora Magazine on Performance Profiling in Fedora. It covers both the basics on how to get started as well as the nitty-gritty details of how profilers work. I’d love for others to be more informed on that so I’m not the only person maintain … | Continue reading
I’m a firm believer in the importance of documentation for open source projects, particularly when it comes to onboarding new contributors. To attract and retain contributors, you need good docs. Those docs aren’t just important for practical information on how to contribute (tho … | Continue reading
This year’s GUADEC is going to be in the USA, making it difficult to attend both for Visa/border control reasons and because it’s not easy to get to from Europe without flying. Many of us want to avoid the massive emissions in particular (around 3 tons of CO2, which is half the y … | Continue reading
GNOME is partipating in the December 2023 – February 2024 round of Outreachy. As part of this project, our interns Dorothy Kabarozi and Tanju Achaleke have extended our end-to-end tests to cover some of GNOME’s accessibility features. End-to-end testing, also known as UI testing, … | Continue reading
7 years since my last post (2017!), so many exciting things to talk about: the AV1 video codec was released, we at Two Orioles wrote an AV1 encoder (Eve) and decoder (dav1d). Covid happened. I became a US citizen. Happily married for 15 years. My two boys are now teenagers (and b … | Continue reading
One of the more recent design trends in GNOME has been the use of sidebars. It looks great, it’s functional, and it gives separation of content from hierarchy. Builder, on the other hand, has been stuck a bit closer to the old-hat design of IDEs where the hierarchy falls strictly … | Continue reading
The venerable GtkSourceView project provides a GtkWidget for various code languages. It has a number of features including the most basic, showing a line number next to your line of text. It turns out that takes a lot more effort than you might think, particularly when you want t … | Continue reading
As of the version 39 of Fedora Silverblue all the basic code is merged to support a composefs-based root filesystem. To try it, do: Update to the latest version (I tested 39.20240115.0) Configure ostree to create and use composefs images: $ sudo ostree config set ex-integrity. … | Continue reading
The GNOME 46 development cycle started around October last year, and it has been a busy one for my GNOME user experience design work (as they all are). I wanted to share some details of what I’ve been working on, both to provide some insight into what I get up to day to day, and … | Continue reading
A couple of months ago, Binarly announced LogoFAIL which is a pretty serious firmware security problem. There is lots of complexity Alex explains much better than I might, but essentially the basics are that 99% of system firmware running right now is vulnerable: The horribly-ins … | Continue reading
Happy 2024! It’s time for the first GNOME Crosswords update of the year. A ton of work happened since the last release — primarily in the Editor. I’ll try to keep this update short and sweet. Packages will be available in flathub momentarily. Move to libadwaita-1.4 The biggest vi … | Continue reading
In non-chronological order Created a new library, called glycin, for image loading Spent a lot of time diamond painting Fixed a bunch of image decoding issues Had a lot of bureaucracy fun Dived much deeper than before into GTK code Moved flat after 14 years at the same place Cha … | Continue reading
It’s exciting to see the ongoing work to revitalise GNOME Online Accounts. One section of this post jumped out to me: Another big step to improving reliability and maintainability is updating to the latest dependencies and industry conventions. This meant first supporting OAuth 2 … | Continue reading
Preface Twenty three years ago a magazine I read featured tools for modding popular video games I had spent hundreds of hours playing. That article triggered a chain of events that would soon lead me into learning how to speak English, collaborate with people on the internet and, … | Continue reading
Normally I’m posting about code here, but for the past two weeks most of my time has been spent taking care of our 4 year old Australian Shepherd. Toby is very special to me and we even share the same birthday! Toby recently lost control of his hind legs, which was related to a h … | Continue reading
The LVFS has now supplied over 100 million updates to Linux machines all around the globe. The true number is unknown, as we allow users to re-distribute updates without any kind of tracking, and also allow large companies or agencies to mirror the entire LVFS so the archive can … | Continue reading
Sysprof is an enormously helpful tool that can be used for identifying performance problems in applications. However, there are a few things that need to be considered in order to get meaningful and useful results, especially for Rust applications. With this blog post I want to … | Continue reading
I have not been so active for a while with writing these Fedora Workstation updates and part of the reason was that I felt I was beginning to repeat myself a lot, which I partly felt was a side effect of writing them so often, but with some time now since my last update I felt th … | Continue reading
This week we had a local-first workshop at offline in Berlin, co-organized with the p2panda project. As I’ve written about before, some of us have been exploring local-first approaches as a way to sync data between devices, while also working great offline. We had a hackfest on t … | Continue reading
My name is Matt Campbell, and I’m delighted to announce that I’m joining the GNOME accessibility team to develop a new accessibility architecture. After providing some brief background information on myself, I’ll describe what’s wrong with the current Linux desktop accessibility … | Continue reading
As you might have read already about, there was a vulnerability in libcue that took a side gig demonstrating a sandbox escape in tracker-miners. The good news first so you can skip the rest, this is fixed in the tracker-miners 3.6.1/3.5.3/3.4.5/3.3.2 versions released on Sept 28t … | Continue reading
Back to GUADEC Four years after my first attendance of GUADEC, in Thessaloniki, I was fortunate enough to once again attend, in-person, the main GNOME conference, which was hosted this year in the enchanting city of Riga. These were four long years! Alright, I’ve watched the onli … | Continue reading
To celebrate every new GNOME release I try to do a little bit of work that would be intrusive to land at the end of the cycle. The 46 cycle is no different and this time I’m making our terminals faster. The terminal is surely the most used desktop app for developers and things ha … | Continue reading
I obsess over battery life. So having a working Sysprof in Fedora 39 with actually useful frame-pointers has been lovely. I heard it asked at an All Systems Go talk if having frame-pointers enabled has gained any large performance improvements. The answer to that is quite simply … | Continue reading
Hello, I am pleased to announce a new version of Cambalache Version 0.16.0 targets the newly released GNOME SDK 45 and includes all the new changes in Gtk and the new Adwaita release. These release should also help people experiencing issues with the workspace since it has a bran … | Continue reading
I am happy to announce a new release of Flatseal. This release comes with refined visuals, improved performance, support for a new permission, quality of life additions, and fixes. Starting off with visuals and performance improvements, these are the result of adopting new widget … | Continue reading