#191 Third Saturday Edition

March 15, 2025 • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 08 to March 15.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) says

libadwaita 1.7.0 has been released, see the accompanying blog post for details: https://nyaa.place/blog/libadwaita-1-7/

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Déjà Dup Backups

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry announces

Two exciting features landed this week for Déjà Dup Backups:

You can now define an Rclone remote as your storage location for backups. This extends the cloud options considerably, though some external configuration of Rclone is required.

Restic is now the default tool for fresh backups (instead of Duplicity). This should be faster and enable some future features (likely will be turned on only for flathub flatpaks builds for now)

Apostrophe

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu (he/they/she) announces

I’ve started working on phone support for Apostrophe. There’s still quite a lot to do, but for the next release it should be already usable in linux phones and in general small window sizes

Third Party Projects

Óscar announces

Introducing LPTK is a new stateless password manager, compatible with LessPass, written in Rust and powered by GTK.

By default it is a completely offline tool that generates passwords depending on what you enter in the input. It does not store any information of any kind and is based on the principle of same input, same output so by simply remembering your master password you can generate passwords for any site you want to authenticate to.

But you also have the possibility to connect against a server (such as Rockpass) so that you don’t have to remember the options entered on each site.

You can download the application directly from Flathub and remember that any feedback or report is always welcome.

Wayne Heaney says

The latest version of Breezy Desktop – a GNOME XR desktop solution – is now available in open beta for users of most popular brands and models of XR glasses. Breezy Desktop allows you to add multiple virtual monitors to your desktop, which get projected in front of you in the glasses, allowing you to look around to view each of the desktops. “Zoom on focus” mode will automatically zoom in on the screen you’re looking towards and “follow mode” allows you to pull the focused display to the center and have it follow you, while the other displays hang back. These features can be quick toggled through keyboard shortcuts for max efficiency. See the announcement for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xreal/comments/1j7gmbd/its_finally_ready_you_can_now_add_virtual/

Miscellaneous

Arjan announces

This week PyGObject 3.52.2 was released.

This release contains significant improvements for GNOME’s Python bindings. The most notable update for 3.52 are:

PyGObject is using GIRepository (from Glib). At runtime it no longer depends on object-introspection.

The automatic initialisation of Gtk and Gdk from PyGObject can be disabled now. This allows fine control over how Gtk and Gdk are initialized.

The standard enum module is used for enums and flags. This makes them behave in a more Pythonic way.

Method signatures are exposed via PyGObject.
>>>  inspect.signature(Gtk.Widget.contains)
<Signature (self, x: float, y: float) -> bool>
We added some convenience functions for using the asyncio. You can set the priority of a task, and enable asyncio support with a with-context:
app = Gio.Application
with gi.events.GLibEventLoopPolicy():
    app.run()
GObject-based classes can now override the (do_)dispose method. This gives you the option to properly clean up (GTK related) resources.

A full list of improvements can be found in the NEWS file.

The code is available from the GNOME download server and PyPI.

Internships

Pedro Sader Azevedo says

The GNOME Internship Committee and Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) have joined forces to organize this year’s GNOME Internship Preparatory Bootcamp. It is an online event for those who are planning to apply to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy internships! Get to know more about these programs and join Q&A sessions with past participants, program organizers, and mentors.

The GNOME Internship Preparatory Bootcamp will happen on March 15th (Saturday) at 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm UTC at this video conferencing link: https://meet.gnome.org/rooms/tl3-fsa-gyb-arq/join

Events

Kristi Progri reports

Reminder: The GUADEC Call for Papers is open until March 16th! Don’t miss your chance to submit your paper and join us in Brescia, Italy, from July 24-29! 🇮🇹✨

Submit here: https://events.gnome.org/event/259/abstracts/#submit-abstract

Kristi Progri says

Linux App Summit 2025 registration is open!

Join us in Tirana, Albania, on April 25th-26th for two days of talks, and community gatherings. We welcome both in-person and online attendees—don’t forget to register! 👉 https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/7/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

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