#212 Happy Birthday!

August 15, 2025 • 14 News • Curated by Felix

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

Cassidy says

On August 15, 1997, Miguel de Icaza announced the start of GNOME on the GTK mailing list. Twenty-eight years later a lot has changed, but we continue to develop and iterate on “a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools… based entirely on free software.”

To help us continue this work far into the future, we hope you join us in celebrating our birthday by becoming a Friend of GNOME today! 🎂

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

FineFindus announces

We have now merged the next part of the Rust port of GNOME Disks, which ports the disk image restore dialog (or the more common use case: flashing ISO disk images to USB drives) to Rust. This also enables the new Disk Image Mounter to write disk images to drives when clicking on a disk image file without opening GNOME Disks.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 reports

A week ago GTK landed CSS media queries support. As of today, libadwaita supports it too, both in its own styles and in app-provided styles. So, apps can now write CSS like this:

:root {
  --my-custom-color: black;
}

my-widget {
  color: var(--my-custom-color);
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  :root {
    --my-custom-color: white;
  }
}

@media (prefers-contrast: more) {
  my-widget {
    box-shadow: inset 0 0 0 1px var(--border-color);
  }
}

style-dark.css, style-hc.css and style-hc-dark.css are still supported for this cycle, but they will be deprecated early next cycle and removed in libadwaita 2.0, so apps are encouraged to switch to media queries.

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps now shows highway shields in place popovers when clicking on road labels (when custom localized shields are defined). And also the user’s avatar is shown in the OpenStreetMap account dialog for setting POI editing (when the user has set an avatar on their account)

Third Party Projects

Jeff reports

In this blog post, Mitchell Hashimoto discusses the recent rewrite of the Ghostty GTK frontend. He focuses on how Zig interfaces with the GObject type system and using Valgrind to ensure that memory leaks are not introduced by application code. https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-gtk-rewrite

andypiper says

Oh, hi. Long time reader, first time poster. I released Fedinspect, a little GNOME app for developers to 🔍 inspect the configuration of fediverse servers, and also run WebFinger lookup queries for individual ActivityPub actors. It will query nodeinfo and other .well-known URIs for these servers, and you can dig into JSON responses and HTTP headers as needed. Maybe niche, hopefully useful to some folks!

You can find it on Flathub. Also, the icon in particular could do with some help to be a bit more GNOMEish, so feel free to help out if you’re so inclined!

Ronnie Nissan reports

Embellish v0.5.1 was released today, featuring a redesign to the header bar and a new Icons page to explore, search and copy Nerd Fonts icons.

The codebase also switched to using Blueprint instead of UI files.

The issue where the list of fonts would jump to the top whenever a font was installed or removed has also been fixed.

Embellish is available only through Flathub, hope you enjoy the new feature.

Alain says

🚀 Planify 4.13.2 – Improvements, Fixes & More Control Over Your Tasks The new 4.13.2 release of Planify is here, focusing on delivering a more stable, smoother, and customizable task management experience.

Here’s what’s new and improved:

  • Better all-day event handling – Events are now correctly detected based on your local time.
  • More control with Todoist – If you can’t log in via OAuth, you can now manually enter your Todoist token.
  • Improved text editing – The description area now has a limited height with scrolling, placeholders behave correctly, and your text won’t reset when repositioning the cursor.
  • Natural sorting – Lists now correctly order strings with numbers (e.g., item2 before item10).
  • Smoother navigation – Improved visual alignment for note-type tasks and the option to display completed tasks directly below pending ones with pagination.
  • Stability fixes – Adjustments to project view transitions, keyboard shortcuts, task duplication, and more.

💬 We’ve also updated translations, added a Discord link, and made several under-the-hood optimizations.

Sepehr Rasouli reports

Sudoku V1.1.2 is here! Sudoku is a new modern app focused on delivering a clean, distraction-free experience. Designed with simplicity and comfort in mind, it features a straightforward interface that helps players stay focused and enjoy the game without unnecessary clutter or complications.

Features:

  • Modern GTK4 and libadwaita interface
  • Keyboard shortcuts for quick access to all functions
  • Save and load games seamlessly to continue your progress anytime
  • Highlight active row and cell to improve focus and ease of play
  • Conflict highlighting to spot mistakes — perfect for learning
  • Fun for all skill levels, from beginners to experts

The project is still in its early stages, so contributions are warmly welcome!

Semen Fomchenkov announces

Introducing Hashsum — a modern checksum utility

This week, the ALT Gnome and ALT Linux Team present Hashsum — a file checksum calculation utility built with GTK4/Libadwaita, inspired by the ideas behind Collision and GTK Hash.

We greatly appreciate the minimalist interface of Collision, but most GTK developers in our community create applications in Vala, so we decided to take the base from Collision and rewrite it from Crystal to make future development and maintenance easier. With Hashsum, we’ve combined the clean UI of Collision with the broad algorithm support of GTK Hash, adding the conveniences our community has been asking for.

Features

  • Modern GTK4/Libadwaita interface inspired by Collision.
  • Support for the following algorithms: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, BLAKE3, CRC-32, Adler-32, GOST R 34.11-94, Streebog-256/512 (via gcrypt and blake3).
  • Flexible selection: enable only the algorithms you actually need.
  • Accurate progress display for large file computations.
  • Files (Nautilus) plugin: calculate checksums directly from the file manager’s context menu.
  • Developed in Vala with love.

What’s next?

We plan to submit Hashsum to Flathub, but our immediate focus will be on adding features important to the community — ensuring it’s not just a direct analog of Collision. Ideas and bug reports are welcome: https://altlinux.space/alt-gnome/Hashsum/issues/new

Best regards to the developers of the Collision project — your enthusiasm and drive for innovation are truly inspiring.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2025.8.0 is here! This release contains new features, bug fixes, and an updated yt-dlp.

Here’s the full changelog:

  • Added the ability to update yt-dlp from within the app when a newer version is available
  • Added padding to single digit numbered titles in playlist downloads
  • Replaced None translation language with en_US
  • Fixed an issue where validating some media would cause the app to crash
  • Fixed an issue where the app would not open on Windows
  • Fixed an issue where download rows disappeared on GNOME
  • Updated yt-dlp

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille says

Knock, knock, knock… on wood rooms, baby 🎵 Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh 🎶 That’s right, Fractal 12 adds support for knocking, among other things. Read all about the improvements since 11.2:

  • Requesting invites to rooms (aka knocking) is now possible, as is enabling such requests for room admins.
  • The upcoming room version 12 is supported, with the special power level of room creators.
  • A room can be marked as unread via the context menu in the sidebar.
  • You can now see if a section in the sidebar has any notifications or activity when it is collapsed.
  • Clicking on the name of the sender of a message adds a mention to them in the composer.
  • The safety setting to hide media previews in rooms is now synced between Matrix clients and we added another safety setting (which is also synced) to hide avatars in invites.

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.

This version is available right now on Flathub.

If you want to join the gang, you can start by fixing one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new members!

Internships

Aryan Kaushik reports

The GNOME Foundation is interested in participating in the December-March cohort of Outreachy.

If you are interested in mentoring AND have a project idea in mind, please visit https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Engagement/internship-project-ideas/-/issues and submit your proposal by 10th September 2025.

We are always on the lookout for project ideas that move the GNOME project forward!

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them on our matrix - #internship:gnome.org or e-mail soc-admins@gnome.org.

Looking forward to your proposals!

GNOME Foundation

steven says

New Foundation Update:

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/08/08/2025-08-08-foundation-update/

  • bureaucracy (yay?)
  • apology to GIMP
  • advisory board room
  • early draft budget
  • 501(c)(3) structural improvements
  • explaining the travel policy freeze

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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