Most of GNOME 51 is now packaged for Fedora 45. Starting today and running through the end of the week, we will be running our traditional Fedora Test Day for GNOME. If you are a Fedora user, you can help us find last-minute integration issues and iron out what’s going to become the stable Fedora 45 release.
You can either boot the latest Fedora 45 image (nightly) in a virtual machine or update an existing test setup. Follow our guided test matrix, try out different features, and record your results. Even testing for 15 minutes and reporting a single issue makes a huge difference.
I have spent the last two years rebuilding GNOME Boxes from the ground up, driven by three main factors. I spoke extensively about this effort in my recent Linux App Summit, GUADEC 2025 and 2026 talks, but today I am excited to share the result for general testing.
First, shifting to a Flatpak-first (and only) model. As a solo developer, maintaining code paths for countless distributions isn’t sustainable. Since Boxes acts as a frontend for libvirt/qemu, its functionality relies heavily on the backend configuration. Flatpak lets me bundle the entire virtualization stack, giving me the control I need to fine-tune it for our specific use cases.
Second, migrating Boxes to GTK4 and Libadwaita. Beyond the obvious benefits (a modern UI, better responsiveness, and tighter desktop integration) this makes the codebase significantly easier to maintain. This transition required moving away from the GTK3-based SPICE display widget, which was too tightly coupled to older input and drawing methods. We’ve replaced it with Libmks, which has proven to be a solid alternative.
Lastly, modernizing the codebase to make it sustainable for new contributors. That meant adopting modern GNOME app design patterns and rethinking our underlying architecture.
I am now ready to share this work with a wider audience. However, please keep in mind that this is a Beta release meant for testing, not for production environments. If you plan to try it out, make sure to back up any important data in your virtual machines first.
If you want to test this new implementation of GNOME Boxes, you can set up the GNOME Nightly Flatpak Repository and install it with:
flatpak install org.gnome.Boxes.Devel
This new version already covers most of what the classic Boxes could do: creating virtual machines from ISO media and disk images (qcow2), configuring VM resources, sharing clipboard content, sending files to the guest, and more.
It can install Windows 11 without any manual workarounds. Boxes configures Secure Boot and a virtual TPM device automatically. Everything required to pass the Windows 11 hardware compatibility checks out of the box. This was the most requested feature for the classic version, so I am particularly glad it is fully functional in this rewrite.
As distributions shift toward image-based OSes, this Flatpak-only approach becomes even more valuable. Most other virtual machine managers rely on host services or privileged daemons that are difficult to configure on immutable systems. While hardware and host combinations vary, bundling the backend stack directly inside the Flatpak gives us a controlled baseline that we can actively support, configure, and refine over time.
Accessing VM contents used to be tricky due to Flatpak sandboxing. This version addresses that by introducing a VSOCK device to the box, allowing guests with systemd v256 or newer to be accessed directly over SSH. It also adds initial support for port forwarding, letting you reach services running inside the VM from your host.
Screenshot of a host terminal SSHing into the guest VM through VSOCK
All of this and more is detailed on our new website, nightly.gnomeboxes.org, where you can also learn how to help by testing and reporting issues.
Please keep in mind that I am working on this in my free time alongside maintaining GNOME Settings and my day-job responsibilities at Red Hat. I ask for your patience with issue responses, but I will do my best to address bugs and keep pushing feature development forward as time allows.
I love building GNOME Boxes, and I am constantly motivated by the positive feedback from our community. People appreciate Boxes because it lets them set up a VM quickly and get straight to work without needing deep knowledge of virtualization or operating system internals. That remains the core mission, and that is the user experience I want to continue building for.
A lot of this implementation will still change as I gather feedback and it matures. I have also drafted a series of follow-up blog posts to this one, which will describe and elaborate a bit more on the new features, explaining how to use them and how they have been implemented. Stay tuned!
We’ve just rolled out a new feature on Planet GNOME to bring our community discussions together! You can now opt in to automatically create a topic on discourse.gnome.org whenever you publish a new blog post.
Having comments centralized on Discourse makes it much easier for readers to discuss your posts, while also ensuring that all interactions are moderated under the GNOME Code of Conduct for a safer, healthier space. It is also a great way to give your content a bit more visibility with the active Discourse community without any extra manual work.
This is especially handy if you run a statically generated blog without an existing comment section, giving your readers a dedicated space to share feedback.
This feature is completely opt-in, so nothing will change for your feed unless you choose to turn it on. To get started, simply send a merge-request to Planet GNOME adding discourse_comments=1 to your blog entry in our config.ini file.
Since this is brand new, there might still be a few rough edges. If anything breaks or acts weird when you try it out, let us know and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.
Last week I attended GUADEC in A Coruña, Spain. While I attend the conference every year, this one was extra special because 14 years ago we held the conference at the same location, and it was my first GUADEC ever. Great memories!
Back in 2012, I was an intern in the Google Summer of Code program, traveling abroad for the first time. Now I feel privileged to have spent all the years since then working on the GNOME project as a professional developer. It turned out to be everything (and more) that my younger self had dreamed of.
Now, living in the Czech Republic, my travel this time was quite smooth compared to my first trip to A Coruña. Vienna -> Madrid -> A Coruña. I managed to leave early in the morning and arrive at the accommodation just in time for the conference’s pre-registration party. Other than the nostalgia of being back in the same Rialta cafeteria, I was super happy to meet some of my long time GNOME friends.
While I stuck to all the talks in the first room, I have now caught up with the room 2 talks via the YouTube recordings. The conference was packed with great desktop content, as always.
On day 1, I would highlight Jakub’s “Symbolic Achievements” regarding the future of our UI icons and Matthias’ recent SVG work. The icon animation work opens up a universe of possibilities for building more polished UIs. At the end of day 1, I went on stage for the “Community Update” session, where I represented the GNOME Settings and the Internship Committee teams.
On day 2, Emmanuele Bassi continued his effort to establish more governance in our project. This inspired me (representing GNOME Settings) and some of the GNOME Shell team to sit down and discuss putting together a Core-Components/System Team. This way, we can collaborate and support each other more effectively across components. As we progress on vertically integrating our desktop experience, our projects become more and more entangled. This requires more and more collaboration and shared responsibilities. We will probably announce this team soon.
Continuing on day 2, Joan presented his progress on passwordless authentication in GDM and Carlos presented an interesting initiative for using Mutter as an application test framework. This could complement other testing methods (such as OpenQA) and help us move away from heavily using the accessibility API for some of our current dogtail-type of UI tests. Additionally, Adrian presented his challenges and ideas for session Save/Restore. This work looks promising and is highly desired by the general audience. This has already been reported on by LWN.
At the end of day 2 I had the chance to present “The Future of Boxes”. A demo of the work I have been doing on the side for the past couple of years to refactor and rewrite Boxes to use a new display widget (libmks), GTK4/libadwaita, and to be a Flatpak-first app. I have a blog post version of this talk coming out in a few days. I’m super excited about the progress I made on this project and how close I feel we are to making it useful for a general audience, just as the “old” Boxes served plenty of users and their workflows.
To wrap up day 2, I hosted our traditional “Intern Lightning Talks” session, where we highlighted the work of our Google Summer of Code interns this season. Two interns managed to attend GUADEC in person, while the other four sent pre-recorded presentations.
Day 3, Saturday, started with a morning-long AGM (the Foundation’s Annual General Meeting). The new format was much more engaging than the ones before. I also would like to praise Allan for doing an excellent job explaining the GNOME Foundation’s processes, finances, and initiatives. After lunch, we watched the traditional “State of the Shell” update from Carlos, Florian, Jonas and Michel. I was also happy to watch Andrea Veri’s update on the state of GNOME Infrastructure, and to learn that our project’s infra is in very good hands during these difficult times.
The local GUADEC organizers put together a lovely dinner experience for everyone. Besides the delicious food and drinks, I spent the night catching up with multiple GNOME friends. This was the same location where we held one of our social events back in 2012. The night sky view of the sea, the fresh air, and the memories were great.
With the three talk days finished, we spent two more days of BoFs/Hackfests. Sunday morning started with my “GNOME Settings BoF”. The session was attended by some well known contributors and also by a few newcomers interested in getting involved or getting answers about the future of our settings. We discussed various topics ranging from the maintenance of some subsystems, AI policy ideas, documentation, and plans for GNOME 51 and 52. I demoed some of my own work-in-progress branches and highlighted what others are working on. I was glad that we received some positive feedback on our recent changes and contributors committed to help review and test some of the work.
At the end of Sunday, I hosted a “GNOME Internship Committee Meetup,” where current and former interns joined Aryan, Maria, and me to discuss how we can improve our internship experience in GNOME. Topics ranged from onboarding and community bonding activities to feedback, etc…
On Sunday evening I went to the Plaza de Maria Pita, the main square in town, to watch the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina. As a football fan, I felt privileged to celebrate this game in the home country of the winning team.
On Monday morning I attended the Design Team BoF, where we discussed various topics, from a transparent topbar in the Shell, to action buttons on dialogs. I started prototyping changes to action dialog buttons for some GNOME Settings dialogs so that the team has something tangible to experiment with. At the end of Monday, my farewell from the conference was participating in the “Engagement Team” BoF. I was happy to see the team getting back in shape again, and how enthusiastic they are. Since I work on Planet GNOME and a couple of other websites, I was happy to help them discuss and develop some ideas for promoting more of our development work through engagement channels (social media accounts, blogs, news reporting, etc…).
On Tuesday, July 21, I flew back home through Barcelona and then Vienna (which is a couple of hours drive from where I live in the Czech countryside).
All in all, I would like to thank the GUADEC organizers for another unforgettable conference, the GNOME community for always raising the bar on the conference’s content, and Red Hat for funding my trip and accommodation in Spain.
Putting on my Planet GNOME editor hat for a quick PSA!
Planet GNOME is a convenient aggregator for personal blogs by members of our community. While all content must follow our Code of Conduct, the views expressed in these posts are solely those of the individual authors.
They don’t represent or reflect the opinions of the GNOME Project as an entity or community.
To help highlight this, we’ve added a “Voices of the community” tagline to the website header. It links directly to our “Add feed” section, which also emphasizes that Planet collects the latest posts from personal blogs.
Enjoy the personal insights and variety of perspectives!
GNOME is once again participating in GSoC. This year, we have 6 contributors working on adding Debug Adapter Protocol support to GJS, incorporating vocab-style puzzles into GNOME Crosswords, creating a native GTK4/Rust rewrite of the Pitivi timeline ruler, porting gitg to GTK4, implementing app uninstallation in the GNOME Shell app grid, and enabling recovery from GPU resets.
As we onboard the contributors, we will be adding them to Planet GNOME, where you can get to know them better and follow their project updates.
GSoC is a great opportunity to welcome new people into our project. Please help them get started and make them feel at home in our community!
Special thanks to our community mentors, who are donating their time and energy to help welcome and guide our new contributors: Philip Chimento, Jonathan Blandford, Yatin, Alex Băluț, Alberto Fanjul, Adrian Vovk, Jonas Ådahl, and Robert Mader.
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.
It is once again that pre-GSoC time of year where I go around asking GNOME developers for project ideas they are willing to mentor during Google Summer of Code. GSoC is approaching fast, and we should aim to get a preliminary list of project ideas by the end of January.
Internships offer an opportunity for new contributors to join our community and help us build the software we love.
The new contributor will soon get their blogs added to Planet GNOME making it easy for the GNOME community to get to know them and the projects that they will be working on. We would like to also thank our mentor, Lucas for supporting Outreachy and helping new contributors enter our project.
If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this Discourse topic or message us privately at soc-admins@gnome.org.
Last week, as I was writing my trip report about the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, I found myself going on a tangent about the program in our community, so I decided to split the content off into a couple of posts. In this post, I want to elaborate a bit on our goal with the program and how intern selection helps us with that.
I have long been saying that GSoC is not a “pay-for-code” program for GNOME. It is an opportunity to bring new contributors to our community, improve our projects, and sustain our development model.
Mentoring is hard and time consuming. GNOME Developers heroically dedicate hours of their weeks to helping new people learn how to contribute.
Our goal with GSoC is to attract contributors that want to become GNOME Developers. We want contributors that will spend time helping others learn and keep the torch going.
Merge-requests are very important, but so are the abilities to articulate ideas, hold healthy discussions, and build consensus among other contributors.
For years, the project proposal was the main deciding factor for a contributor to get an internship with GNOME. That isn’t working anymore, especially in an era of AI-generated proposals. We need to up our game and dig deeper to find the right contributors.
This might even mean asking for fewer internship slots. I believe that if we select a smaller group of people with the right motivations, we can give them the focused attention and support to continue their involvement long after the internship is completed.
My suggestion for improving the intern selection process is to focus on three factors:
History of Contributions in gitlab.gnome.org: applicants should solve a few ~Newcomers issues, report bugs, and/or participate in discussions. This gives us an idea of how they perform in the contributing process as a whole.
Project Proposal: a document describing the project’s goals and detailing how the contributors plans to tackle the project. Containing some reasonable time estimates.
An interview: a 10 or 15 minutes call where admins and mentors can ask applicants a few questions about their Project Proposal and their History of Contributions.
The final decision to select an intern should be a consideration of how the applicant performed across these aspects.
Contributor selection is super important, and we must continue improving our process. This is about investing in the long-term health and sustainability of our project by finding and nurturing its future developers.
If you want to find more about GSoC with GNOME, visit gsoc.gnome.org
