mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Free & #OpenSource contributor (#Linux + #GNOME + #GStreamer) since 2004. Now co-maintaining the most magical desktop productivity apps combo (@GettingThingsGNOME@fosstodon.org & GNOME Calendar) as their benevolent lean engineering manager + occasional User Interaction & UX designer.
Waging war on mediocrity & unsustainability in business.
Founder of @ideemarque@mastodon.social + @atypica@mastodon.social, and Managing Partner at @regento@mastodon.social.
Ex-Collabora, ex-psy, ex-Shinra.
I don't roleplay but I wear a cloak. ❄️
#fedi22
Tune in to https://www.youtube.com/live/nBL7dkdDEmg at 21h UTC this Friday night (in ~20 minutes) to see Georges livestreaming his GNOME Calendar coding & merge requests review session 
#GNOMECalendar #programming #GNOME #FLOSS #OpenSource #Linux #LoFi #GTK
Someone brought me a ThinkPad R60; it has 1 GB of RAM, an Intel T1300 CPU, 5400rpm IDE HDD, and still has WinXP installed.
I booted it up just for fun and… it's still impressive how lean XP was. Everything launches and reacts instantly, and the whole OS with a couple windows open fits in 210 MB of RAM. The largest process, the "Explorer" file manager, fits in 25 MB.
Even as a Linux desktop user, I haven't often seen this level of scarce resources optimization lately.
RE: @nate@ouo.sh
When I said I'd like to bring some skeuomorphism back to GNOME Calendar, I did not imagine something as intense as this 😳
PSA: following the example from various other projects within GNOME (such as Loupe and libadwaita), GNOME Calendar now explicitly forbids AI-generated contributions, with the same policy: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/merge_requests/725
We honor the exquisite art of organic homegrown code made with care and a willingness to learn the craft, and want to protect the time of people who help review merge requests.
#MaintainerLife #FreeSoftware #FLOSS #OpenSource #GNOMECalendar #NoAI #aislop #genAI #LLM #GNOME #libadwaita
In defence of GNOME2-style button labels: https://gitlab.gnome.org/jbrummer/stamp/-/work_items/166
I wish more GNOME4 applications would do this adaptive design usability trick. I have plenty of screen space on my desktop monitors, use it!
Before one considers a GNOME Shell "quick setting" toggle for temporarily charging your battery to 100% (if you have a one-off need for more capacity for a long mobile work day), I think the more fundamental place to start solving the puzzle might be the GNOME Settings app.
I spent some time thinking about the simplest UI solution I could imagine for this: a boost button that appears there when your laptop is set to "Preserve Battery Health" mode.
Filed here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/work_items/3802
If you've been testing GTK/libadwaita applications on a touchscreen and experienced difficulty pasting text using only the touchscreen, I believe I have now filed the bug report you are looking for: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/8172
The "Speed of Sound" app by @zugaldia@mastodon.social, once you set up a custom global keyboard shortcut that doesn't conflict with GNOME's, is pretty amazing: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.speedofsound.SpeedOfSound
This is the first time I experience reliable speech recognition for #dictation on the desktop, particularly on #Linux! Until now I had given up on that being a possibility.
Works really well in English. It struggles with French, but who doesn't?!
Installed #Fedora 44 on a PC to replace a buggy Debian "stable", and got to use the new Anaconda UI (the one made with a web interface behind the scenes)…
Wow. For the first time in decades, the advanced partitioning tool lets me delete & create partitions without issues! It doesn't mis-parse sizes, it gives me hints (in sidebar) on which partitions it expects/needs, and it doesn't lag!
The installer was my no.1 issue in Fedora, and it finally works for my usecase 😌
PSA to GNOME Calendar contributors: we just merged a pair of refactoring branches that rearchitect tons of code to eliminate a whole class of problems in the backend and the views: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/work_items/1496
This unfortunately means many contributors with pending merge requests will have to manually rebase and deconflict their code on top of the latest main branch. It may feel like reloading a Patlabor's revolver, but should be worth it.
Addressbook search UX feature request in the Stamp email client, in which I presume that the head of the Sovereign Tech Agency's phone number certainly ends with "nein nein nein": https://gitlab.gnome.org/jbrummer/stamp/-/work_items/167
I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but it seems that when you configure a brand new #IMAP email account in @EvolutionGnome@floss.social, it sometimes does not subscribe to the main INBOX folder, which in my experience will cause all sorts of weird synchronization issues. I reported by spontaneous observation about this tonight (thanks to getting a fresh new email account as an official #LibreOffice community member): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/3261
Something that has been on my mind for nearly 30 years: why did the French translators for FF7 rename "Cloud" to "Clad", while "Claude" was _right there_ ?!
Claude couldn't have been more French even if they replaced the Buster Sword with a big baguette.
I heartily recommend testing your apps with various accessibility settings enabled.
You can find so many odd issues with those. "Always Show Scrollbars", for example:
* I found a performance bug with vertical tabs in #Firefox that completely flew under the radar: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2016616#c14
* Noticed the awkward look of scrollbars in the middle of Meld: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld/-/issues/956
* Discovered misalignment in GNOME Calendar's week view: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/issues/621
Decided to spoil myself & purchase a Bluetooth headset, the Fiio EH11: https://fiio.com/eh11
YouTubers rave about it as the Koss Porta Pro killer; it's ⅓ the price & you can tune it with a persistent EQ.
Rotary maple wood knobs on the sides (to skip tracks / adjust volume) is genius.
I hope the microphone is good, as it would be a huge plus for calls while exercising or commuting.
I hate that it uses a proprietary battery (with USB-C charging) instead of AAA, but YOLO 🤷
As a cat masquerading as a dog, I am very confused by these stickers I saw in Montréal while passing by.
Seems pretty ratcist.
If the local rats could read, they would be very upset!
I've been using wired ethernet for 20+ years for all important computers, VoIP phones, IPTVs.
Regularly folks tell me, "The new gen #WiFi [insert nickname] solves stability & speed problems, no need for wires, it's not 2005 anymore!"… yet every few months I encounter another situation where WiFi inexplicably fails and I think about this article from 2017: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-eleventy-what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks/
Today's incident: mom's laptop WiFi randomly disconnecting from OpenWRT. Screw that, I'll pull a new gigabit cable 😤
Ce mardi 3 mars je serai présent pour cadrer les discussions lors de cette rencontre informelle de l'association québécoise du logiciel libre. Si vous êtes à Montréal et avez du temps cet après-midi là, joignez-vous à l'événement, tous/toutes sont bienvenu(e)s: https://agendadulibre.qc.ca/events/2812
#Montréal #LogicielLibre #FLOSS #FreeSoftware #OpenSource #business #networking #AQLL
#MaintainerLife #FLOSS #OpenSource
But also, I fear this rugpull could go "very wrong" with Firefox Sync across multiple computers, and with extensions such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/ (which uses bookmarks behind the scenes)
Chromium and Electron tell web apps when your microphone is soft-muted at the OS level, which is pretty nice for #WebRTC videoconferencing websites like #Jitsi.
You can see it in Jitsi's "waiting room" before entering the meeting, and Jitsi's CPU consumption drops while muted. There's no such indication while inside the meeting however, and it wastes CPU processing silent audio, so I reported that: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/17282
Doesn't work at all in #Firefox though. Anyone knows the API name?
I would offer beer/tea/Club-Mate™ to whoever implements the "Mouse Cursor A.T. Field for Qt apps" feature as a GNOME Shell extension; bonus points if you also bring back the NERV emergency lockdown screen from 15 years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zR67NtGaQqs
Ce matin j'ai pris le temps de mesurer les combinaisons de couleurs et signaler le manque de contraste nuisant à l'accessibilité visuelle des instances de #AgendaDuLibre en mode clair (durant le jour): https://framagit.org/agenda-libre/agenda-libre-ruby/-/work_items/258
#a11y #accessibility #ContrastRebellion #accessibilité #usability #UX #logiciellibre
