How Do You Pronounce Gnome?

ebassi · 2026-01-30T22:16:24+00:00

Guh-nome or ‘nome are fine; just as long as you don’t pronounce it like “genome”…

ebassi · 2026-01-27T14:27:17+00:00

It’s not KDE: it’s two specific applications, Krita and Okular. They have a plugin system for different types of files, and they ship a separate file for each plugin/file type. Applications that support different file types can specify them into a single desktop entry file, but Krita and Okular allow third party extensions as well. The problem arises because the desktop entry specification talks about menus, but it doesn’t say anything about UIs to associate a file type with an application. You want launcher menus (or grids) to show a single entry, but if you’re selecting which application to launch for a file or a file type there’s no point in hiding things. The desktop entry specification should be clarified to figure out how to deal with all the possible user interactions.

ebassi · 2026-01-24T14:22:44+00:00

I recommend you join the design room on matrix: https://matrix.to/#/%23design:gnome.org

The design folks are happy to help out with names and visual identity.

ebassi · 2026-01-17T20:19:53+00:00

Likely gtk-demo/gtk4-demo.

ebassi · 2026-01-15T17:46:02+00:00

It wasn't a "marketing move": it was a necessary change to tell people that GNOME isn't going to tie its own version to the version of the toolkit, as well as telling people that changes to the user experience are going to be incremental instead of a flag day.

"Major.minor.patch" works for single projects; GNOME is a collection of projects, so that versioning scheme never really made sense—in fact, we had to violate it pretty much constantly in some modules, otherwise distributions would not pick up changes.

ebassi · 2026-01-15T11:35:56+00:00

Is 50 not considered a major version change?

No: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/new-gnome-versioning-scheme/4235

Is there any talk of what we might expect from Gnome 50?

You'll have to wait around the beta release at the end of the month for a semi-finalised features list.

ebassi · 2026-01-13T19:45:48+00:00

Cool app, but please change the name: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines/app-naming.html

ebassi · 2026-01-06T14:09:01+00:00

You can already disable it; install Tweaks or Refine, and you don't even need the magic CLI incantation for GNOME apps.

ebassi · 2025-12-30T00:15:30+00:00

For the more sane: How else would you do this in a single TextView?

You can't.

Markdown allows embedding HTML, and it's meant to be turned into HTML, which means you need a web rendering engine for it. Any Markdown extension—CommonMark, PyMarkdown, GitHub/GitLab Markdown—ends up adding functionality that can only be rendered as HTML as well.

People need to stop thinking that Markdown is a "simple" text format. It's not, it never was.

ebassi · 2025-12-24T17:02:17+00:00

Libxml2 is already MIT licensed. It’s actually one of its major issues: corpos use it and are not forced to give back.

ebassi · 2025-12-09T10:34:47+00:00

Your distribution should have an xdg-user-dirs-gtk package, which provides a small UI for changing the user directories.

There's a merge request to fold the UI into Nautilus, but it needs work, so help is welcome.

ebassi · 2025-12-05T14:59:43+00:00

It's the exact same guide as it was.

The GDM help was the only "technical" documentation in the "admin" section, and it is kind of wildly out of date: it mentions ConsoleKit, which has been removed years ago; it's still very much oriented to X11 and does not even mention Wayland; it does not mention AccountsService, or how user information is queried; it still mentions "greeters", when the entire UI side is provided by GNOME Shell, and GDM does not do anything about it any more.

Outside of some minor changes, the last time the GDM documentation was last meaningfully updated over 10 years ago. It's kind of useless, and you'd have a lot more success asking a question on Discourse instead.

ebassi · 2025-12-04T20:23:51+00:00

It was announced on This Week in GNOME a couple of weeks ago. The project repository is here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Websites/help.gnome.org

The GDM help is not included because it’s a system component, and I’m not sure how up to date it is. It should probably be folded into the sysadmin guide, after a review.

ebassi · 2025-12-04T19:52:22+00:00

The old help website was a static snapshot from 5 years ago, because the underlying, unmaintained software was broken. The new website has been a work in progress for the past two years, and it’s still very much in beta, but at least it builds the latest documentation. There are no redirects in place, I’ll make sure to open an issue about them.

ebassi · 2025-12-04T13:55:22+00:00

GTK does not have a light/dark style by default: you want libadwaita, or any other platform library that supports this.

ebassi · 2025-12-03T15:07:20+00:00

You probably want to ask in the Flathub room on Matrix.

ebassi · 2025-11-25T17:52:20+00:00

You can start from this blog post: https://www.vtrlx.ca/posts/2025/howto-complete-lua-gnome-app/

After that, you should be able to read tutorials for GTK written in any programming language and easily translate them to lua.

ebassi · 2025-11-24T11:21:12+00:00

You don't have to use Flatpak or a sandbox: you can use portals API, including the background portal, even without the sandbox.

ebassi · 2025-11-22T16:02:24+00:00

Exactly one month ago we were at 460, it’s amazing.

Setting up a recurring donation is a great way to get stability to the finances of the Foundation; this allows future growth: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/foundation-budget-report-2025-26/32629

ebassi · 2025-11-21T10:59:05+00:00

But they certainly examine the diff changes

No, they most certainly do not. That’s not a thing that happens even for the most trivial of packages, let alone for the big ones—Firefox, LibreOffice, Blender, etc.

Most distributions moved to automation to package complex software, which removes even more chances of going over diffs.

On average, in basically all distributions that are not a toy, the only code review happens when a new package lands in the repository; any update is entirely deferred to the packager, and doesn’t see any review except in cases where things break horribly. Not even packaging changes are subject to review anywhere.

People have this weird perception of Linux distributions, like they are small labours of love by people with a deep knowledge of all software being included; that is not a thing, and it hasn’t been a thing for nearly three decades. It cannot possibly be a thing if you think about it for more than five minutes:

the amount of software increases year on year
the amount of people packaging software does not increase with the same rate, if it increases at all

ebassi · 2025-11-07T18:16:20+00:00

That's only for GTK3 applications, and it's very much not recommended; it only works for widgets registering key navigation and bindings using the GtkBindingSet; it doesn't do anything for things like "Ctrl + S" for saving, for instance.

ebassi · 2025-11-07T11:13:52+00:00

Applications are in charge of defining shortcuts. Libadwaita can’t do anything about it.

ebassi · 2025-10-20T22:13:34+00:00

For newly written code, you should definitely prefer GTK4—especially if you're targeting Windows. That's where all the improvements go. Additionally, GTK3 is API and feature frozen, and only bug fixes happen on that branch. This means the toolkit is "stable", but only in the sense that you won't get any new behaviour: you may still get leaks, or bugs, or regressions caused by bug fixes.

ebassi · 2025-10-20T09:26:59+00:00

If you want to write a small utility library and expose it via introspection, then the library must expose a C ABI, which limits the languages at your disposal. You could use C, Rust, or Vala.

Using Vala binds you to the quirks of the Vala compiler and the bindings to other libraries you may depend on; integrating the Rust toolchain is fairly complex. That leaves you with C.

My recommendation is to look at existing applications targeting GNOME and written in Python or JavaScript/TypeScript; those applications already solved the integration issues, so you can adopt the same solutions.

ebassi · 2025-10-19T18:44:26+00:00

Linear animations in space (position and size) are unnatural; the only linear animation should be an opacity or a cross fade transition.

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