#264 Version Picking

September 4, 2026 • 9 Notes • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 28 to September 4.

GNOME Foundation

marimaj reports

We’ve held an AUA on Reddit with GNOME’s new Board members last Saturday. Sri Ramkrishna — President, Jonathan Blandford — Vice-President, Maria Majadas — Chair, and Adrian Vovk — Vice-Secretary, answered all the proposed questions from the participants. You can read them in:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1vz7pja/meet_the_board/

Thank you for joining us!

GNOME Fellowship

Peter Eisenmann says

I posted about all the cool things I got up to in August as part of the GNOME Fellowship, read about it here :) https://blogs.gnome.org/p3732/fellowship-report-august-2026-rivendell/

Sophie (she/her) says

New month, new GNOME Fellowship report. You can read about my contributions in my August 2026 blog post.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

Peter Eisenmann reports

Files, aka nautilus, received some great changes in the 51 cycle, here is a selection of my favorites:

  • AdwTabOverview is used in narrow mode
  • Slightly smoother navigation by delayed clearing
  • Show count badge when while dragging multiple files
  • Open locations from other apps in new tabs
  • Add an empty document menu entry in case of empty templates directory
  • Selection handling improvements:
    • Correctly restore focus and selection if a file gets removed
    • Don’t unselect when right clicking the view’s background
    • Don’t override manual selection with file operation results
  • Correctly raise the window when other apps call “Open location”
  • Type-to-search support in app chooser dialog
  • Accessibility enhancement, e.g. for filename entry feedback
  • More tests (📈 44%)

PS: Ctrl+E is a not-yet-documented shortcut to focus the file chooser filename entry

Peter’s work is funded by the GNOME Fellowship program. You can support the fellowship program via a donation.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Alexander Vanhee announces

In Bazaar, we are dropping the dialog you sometimes see when installing an app that makes you pick a specific source, in favor of just putting the non-primary sources somewhere on the app’s page. This should make the most common case of just installing the normal version of the app faster and avoid confusion for new users who don’t know what option to install.

Third Party Projects

Lanséria reports

Hey people, this week I’ve finally published the new version of PedantiK, 1.6.0, that includes new language packs!

PedantiK is a game where you need to find the hidden Wikipedia page by guessing words one by one. The new version include a new English language pack, allowing you to play in English or French by installing what language you want!

PedantiK is available through Flathub

Shell Extensions

Christian W reports

It’s sci-fi week for Gnome. This week cwittenberg published two purely-for-fun sci-fi extensions:

Matrix turns your desktop into the familiar falling digital rain from The Matrix, while still keeping your normal desktop usable underneath it.

Starfield takes things a little further into space, adding a Star Trek: The Next Generation-inspired starfield that makes it look like your desktop is flying through the stars.

Both extensions preserve your existing wallpaper and renders the effects efficiently on the GPU using a shader, consuming hardly any CPU.

Neither extension will make you more productive. They may, however, make staring at your desktop considerably more entertaining.

Extension app: search for “Matrix code” Matrix: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/10708/matrix-code-rain/ Source: https://github.com/cwittenberg/matrix-rain

Extension app: search for “starfield” from @cwittenberg Starfield: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/10743/starfield/ Source: https://github.com/cwittenberg/starfield

Tomáš Gažovič reports

RSS Feed GNOME Shell extension has a new release (version 9.0).

Adding your feeds no longer means typing them in one by one: you can import the whole list at once from an OPML file, the same format you can export from pretty much any other reader. Export works too, so moving your feeds somewhere else is no problem.

Accessibility also improved: the panel menu is now fully keyboard operable, and the view scrolls along to keep the focused item visible.

Under the hood, the extension now checks whether a feed changed before downloading it, so refreshes are lighter on the network. Feed data also lives in a JSON store instead of GSettings, which handles larger feed lists better.

Supports GNOME 46 to 51.

Get it on EGO | Source on GitHub

Miscellaneous

Sophie (she/her) announces

We are in the process of introducing a new decision-making process into the GNOME project. The specification of the RFC process is available as a merge request on GitLab. The discussion is happening on the respective Discourse thread. I am now announcing the start of the final comment period for the adoption of this RFC process. We are deviating from the proposal’s 14-day period for this occasion and instead will consider concerns raised up until October 4th at 23:59 UTC. All active GNOME Foundation members remain invited to contribute to the discussion.

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!