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Using Libravatar/Gravatar for your profile in Planet GNOME

Now that the new planet.gnome.org website is live, we have added Libravatar and Gravatar support. Instead of having the Planet website host user images itself, we are giving members the choice to use profile images/avatars from these services.

If you are interested in updating your profile picture, check out the instructions at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Websites/planet.gnome.org#adding-an-avatar and file an issue. Extra points if you do a merge-request! 🙂

The old hackergotchis are an important part of our community’s history, so I set up a static website to host the old files. Feel free to file an issue if you want yours taken down from there.

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GNOME is Sponsoring an Outreachy Internship Project for GNOME Crosswords!

We are excited to announce that the GNOME Foundation is sponsoring an Outreachy internship project for the June 2025 to August 2025 internship round!

Outreachy provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living.

The intern will work with mentors Jonathan Blandford, Federico Mena Quintero, and Tanmay Patil on the project Add Wordlist Scoring to the GNOME Crosswords Editor.

The intern’s blog will soon be added to Planet GNOME, where you can follow their project updates and learn more about them. Stay tuned!

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GNOME Welcomes Its Google Summer of Code 2025 Contributors!

We are happy to announce that five contributors are joining the GNOME community as part of GSoC 2025!

This year’s contributors will work on backend isolation in GNOME Papers, adding eBPF profiling to Sysprof, adding printing support in GNOME Crosswords, and Vala’s XML/JSON/YAML integration improvements. Let’s give them a warm welcome!

In the coming days, our new contributors will begin onboarding in our community channels and services. Stay tuned to Planet GNOME to read their introduction blog posts and learn more about their projects.

If you want to learn more about Google Summer of Code internships with GNOME, visit gsoc.gnome.org.

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It’s alive! Welcome to the new Planet GNOME!

A few months ago, I announced that I was working on a new implementation of Planet GNOME, powered by GitLab Pages. This work has reached a point where we’re ready to flip the switch and replace the old Planet website.

You can check it out at planet.gnome.org

This was only possible thanks to various other contributors, such as Jakub Steiner, who did a fantastic job with the design and style, and Alexandre Franke, who helped with various papercuts, ideas, and improvements.

As with any software, there might be regressions and issues. It would be a great help if you report any problems you find at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Websites/planet.gnome.org/-/issues

If you are subscribed to the old Planet’s RSS feed, you don’t need to do anything. But if you are subscribed to the Atom feed at https://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml, you will have to switch to the RSS address at https://planet.gnome.org/rss20.xml

Here’s to blogs, RSS feeds, and the open web!

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Time to write proposals for GSoC 2025 with GNOME!

It is that time of the year again when we start gathering ideas and mentors for Google Summer Code.

@Mentors, please submit new proposals in our Project ideas GitLab repository before the end of January.

Proposals will be reviewed by the GNOME GSoC Admins and posted in https://gsoc.gnome.org/2025 when approved.

If you have any doubts, please don’t hesitate to contact the GNOME Internship Committee.

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Announcement: GNOME will have an Outreachy intern working on librsvg

We are excited to announce that the GNOME Foundation is sponsoring an Outreachy internship for the December-March round!

The intern will work with mentor Federico Mena Quintero on the project, “Implement the SVG2 text layout algorithm in librsvg.”

The intern’s blog will soon be added to Planet GNOME, where you can follow their project updates and learn more about them. Stay tuned!

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GNOME Settings 47 Retrospective

While cutting the 47.2 release earlier today, I couldn’t help but reflect on everything we’ve accomplished this cycle. But instead of just listing code changes, I want to use this opportunity to give credit where it’s due, because to me, software is about people!

Much of what we have achieved this cycle is thanks to the dedication of passionate volunteer contributors such as Matthijs Velsink, Automeris Naranja, Hari Rana, Alice Mikhaylenko, Andy Holmes, Adrian Vovk, Corey Berla, Joan Torres, Joshua, Adrien Plazas, Jamie Murphy, and many others. I’m also deeply grateful to the translation teams for making GNOME accessible in so many different languages.

The GNOME Design team has been invaluable throughout this cycle. A big thank you to Allan Day, Jakub Steiner, Sam Hewitt, and Jamie Gravendeel, for their essential contributions.

Special thanks to Matthijs Velsink for taking on the challenging role of co-maintaining Settings with me. I couldn’t manage it without Matthijs’ outstanding contributions to fixes, features, and reviews. We’re lucky to have him as part of the project.

Release 47 holds extra significance for me. Wearing my downstream hat, I can share (it’s no secret) that the upcoming RHEL 10 Workstation will primarily feature GNOME 47 components. Building a solid upstream foundation for this version has been one of my top priorities, and I’m happy with the results.

Thanks to the evolution of libadwaita, we’ve been able to port many of our custom widgets to modern libadwaita ones. This transition enhances consistency across the desktop, improves accessibility, and ensures better responsiveness on screens of various sizes. A big shoutout to the incredible folks working on libadwaita for making this possible!

With Libadwaita we added Accent Color settings, allowing customizing our default blue accent color throughout the GNOME app ecosystem. Personally, I’ve been rocking the purple accent color on my desktop. 🙂

We also revisited the interface for adding local and enterprise user accounts, improving it with libadwaita widgets, a new password and username feedback widget, and addressing some technical debt along the way. Speaking of interface modernization, we’ve also revamped several UIs in the Printing settings.

Over time, some of our UIs have evolved at different paces, often leaving us with interfaces in transitional states and UX inconsistencies. A common example was nested dialogs, where a button within a dialog could open yet another dialog. To address this, many top-level dialogs have been converted into subpages using libadwaita’s AdwNavigationView, resulting in a smoother browsing experience.

We continually refine the settings texts and descriptions to align more closely with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Many settings have also been reworded to improve clarity and discoverability too.

There’s so much more that happened this cycle, including a lot of performance improvements, bug fixes, and various tweaks. You can find more changes listed on the ‘Version History’ dialog in GNOME Software.

We’re always looking for contributors, and there are many ways you can help improve GNOME Settings. Visit apps.gnome.org/Settings to learn how to get started.