Starting next week, June 17th, the linter will no longer allow enabling automatic merge for pull requests created by flatpak-external-data-checker, unless the app uses an extra-data source or has been added to the exceptions list. The verified apps utilizing automerge-flathubbot-prs before May 28th have been grandfathered and no explicit action is required from the maintainers. If your app does not meet these criteria, you can still request an exception by creating a pull request to the flatpak-builder-lint repository. Exception requests will be judged on a case-by-case basis on providing vali ..read more

Yesterday evening we released systemd v256 into the wild. While other projects, such as Firefox are just about to leave the 7bit world and enter 8bit territory, we already entered 9bit version territory! For details about the release, see our announcement mail. In the weeks leading up to this release I have posted a series of serieses of posts to Mastodon about key new features in this release. Mastodon has its goods and its bads. Among the latter is probably that it isn't that great for posting listings of serieses of posts. Hence let me provide you with a list of the relevant first post in ..read more

A while back, I wrote about using the SSH agent protocol to satisfy WebAuthn requests. The main problem with this approach is that it required starting the SSH agent with a special argument and also involved being a little too friendly with the implementation - things worked because I could provide an arbitrary public key and the implementation never validated that, but it would be legitimate for it to start doing so and then break everything. And it also only worked for keys stored on tokens that ssh supports - there was no way to extend this to other keystores on the client (such as the Sec ..read more

Introduction Recently, the Linux Mint Blog published Monthly News – April 2024, which goes into detail about wanting to fork and maintain older GNOME apps in collaboration with other GTK-based desktop environments. Despite the good intentions of the author, Clem, many readers interpreted this as an attack against GNOME. Specifically: GTK, libadwaita, the relationship between them, and their relevance to any desktop environment or desktop operating system. Unfortunately, many of these readers seem to have a lot of difficulty understanding what GTK is trying to be, and how libadwaita helps. In t ..read more

With GNOME 46.2 released, it seems like a good time to write a post about goings on in GNOME Online Accounts and other STF-funded initiatives. There's a lot to be excited about this cycle and most of it is leading to more improvements in the near future. # GNOME Online Accounts A lot happened in GNOME 46 for GNOME Online Accounts, including two new providers, a port to GTK4 and Adwaita, authentication in the desktop browser, and a large refactoring towards contemporary platform conventions. The new WebDAV and Microsoft 365 providers contrast quite a bit, although both made progress in the gene ..read more

SwiftNavigation To celebrate that RealityKit's is coming to MacOS, iOS and iPadOS and is no longer limited to VisionOS, I am releasing https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftNavigation for RealityKit. Last year, as I was building a game for VisionPro, I wanted the 3D characters I placed in the world to navigate the world, go from one point to another, avoid obstacles and have those 3D characters avoid each other. Almost every game engine in the world uses the C++ library RecastNavigation library to do this - Unity, Unreal and Godot all use it. SwiftNavigation was born: Both a Swift wrapper to t ..read more

Mail chew; packed for OW2con; 1:1s with Andras and Miklos, M. drove me to the station, train(s) to Paris, caught up with admin. Eventually got to the hotel; met up with Meven for dinner - and back to work ..read more

Up; All Saints, played Guitar with Mary and iSing; home for pizza lunch; Hopper wedding - played with Cedric and Sian & Mary - reception afterwards. Home to rest; finished All the light you cannot see or somesuch - good; then also About Time - unsuitable but well meant ..read more

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 31 to June 07. This Week in GNOME is dedicated to the struggles of all lesbian, gay, trans, inter, bi, pan, asexual, aromantic, non-binary, and queer people. LGBTQIA+ people have always been an integral part of our project, across all different roles. We wish to take this opportunity to thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for all your contributions to GNOME and to our community as whole. We as a project have a fundamental responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of everyone in our community. This can only ..read more

Introduction In my previous post I talked about how to use systemd-sysext to add software to the Steam Deck without modifying the root filesystem. In this post I will give a brief overview of two additional methods. Distrobox distrobox is a tool that uses containers to create a mutable environment on top of your OS. With distrobox you can open a terminal with your favorite Linux distro inside, with full access to the package manager and the ability to install additional software. Containers created by distrobox are integrated with the system so apps running inside have normal access to the us ..read more