Code & Community

It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post about my work on GNOME Design and Community Management as part of my Sovereign Tech Fellowship. As usual, I want to share some of the most interesting developments.

Passkey Portal

Passkeys are an easy and safe way to sign in, and can replace passwords. They’re tied to the website that issued them, so they can’t be phished. Hackers can’t steal them from a website because its servers don’t store your private key. You can learn more about passkeys and how they work at whatarepasskeys.info.

People have been working to bring passkey support to Linux for several years, and we’re getting closer to making it available to users. Just today, the experimental credentials portal was merged into xdg-desktop-portal. To support its implementation in GNOME, I’ve spent a lot of time researching and refining the design of the credentials portal. Below is an excerpt from the credentials portal mockup. Take a look at the full mockup in the OS mockups repository for all the user interaction flows.

Libadwaita

In my last blog post, I wrote about standardizing scale rows in libadwaita and mentioned that ActionRow would likely get a generic bottom child widget to support the change. This has now landed as the ActionRow:body property, and the calendar app Era already uses it to implement its participants row.

The new scale style has also already landed in the upcoming libadwaita version.

Other

If you’ve read this blog before, you may have noticed that the font has changed. Inter has been installed on GNOME’s WordPress instance, so community members can now use it on their personal GNOME blogs to keep their typography consistent with GNOME’s web standards.

As usual, I’ve reviewed design changes across various projects and answered questions on Matrix and in issue threads. GNOME Circle reviews are also progressing well, and I’ll write more about them as the changes land.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment on this blog or reach out to me on Mastodon or Matrix.

It has been another productive month working on GNOME Design and Community Management as part of my Sovereign Tech Fellowship, and I want to share some of the most interesting developments.

Introduction

I want to begin by highlighting how much the Sovereign Tech Fellowship has changed the conditions under which I contribute to GNOME. As a volunteer, I had to fit my contributions around my day job, working on GNOME in the evenings and during holidays. The Fellowship has enabled me to significantly expand the scope of my work. I can focus more on platform-level design and work on structural changes that make it easier for others to contribute. This type of work reaches many people, and it makes me feel particularly effective.

At the same time, working on GNOME is now my job, which allows me to maintain a much clearer separation between work and free time. I am really enjoying having more time for sports, and I have also started taking regular piano lessons again. I spent the last two weeks of August on holiday in nature and returned feeling refreshed and motivated.

Thank you very much to the Sovereign Tech Agency for this opportunity!

GNOME Circle

GNOME Circle is a certification for high-quality third-party apps that also serves as an educational program for app developers and designers. Unfortunately, GNOME Circle had to close applications in May because the small team of volunteer reviewers could not keep up with the large backlog of unreviewed apps.

Thankfully, several people responded to the call for reviewers, and Tobias recently introduced Sjoerd, Will, FineFindus and me to the review process. Sjoerd was able to start his first reviews of Concessio and Iconic immediately, drawing on the design experience he gained from receiving the Circle review of his app, Graphs. I also started reviewing two apps: Quadrapassel, a Tetris clone, and Mecalin, a keyboard typing lesson app. Quadrapassel is developed by Will, and my review aims to share some of my design experience before he starts reviewing submissions himself. FineFindus has started reviewing Field Monitor, and Tobias and I provided feedback on their review before it was posted publicly.

This represents a significant increase in our review capacity, and I am optimistic that we will soon complete the remaining reviews and then be able to reopen submissions. I would like to thank all previous and current Circle Committee members for setting up and contributing to this program, as well as for reviewing all the excellent GNOME Circle apps. If you want to get involved, reach out on the GNOME Circle Matrix channel.

Scale Row Standardization

Libadwaita provides several types of boxed-list rows for common use cases, such as text entries, password entries, switches, and dropdowns. However, it has so far been missing a row with a scale, which has led apps to implement custom widgets with inconsistent styling. Let’s change that.

I started the Scale Row design process by collecting screenshots of existing use cases and examples of state-of-the-art designs from other platforms. Looking at other platforms is always helpful, but I also needed to take into account the requirements of our design system and its technical capabilities. Because Scale Row will be based on Action Row, it needs to support a title, subtitle, prefix widgets, and suffix widgets. To make the layout work in narrow windows, it also became clear that the scale should be placed below the title. Several rounds of sketching, mockups, and discussion led to the following preliminary design.

Originally, I intended to design only the row layout and use the scale as it was. However, aligning the start and end of the scale with the labels and icons required us to change the scale’s padding. That change has already landed in Libadwaita, and we decided to take the opportunity to review the scale’s style as well.

I found that the current style does not follow our design system’s 6-pixel grid, and that the knob is smaller than the minimum target size required by the WCAG accessibility guidelines. I therefore proposed several options inspired by other design systems. What we can adjust is largely restricted by what GtkScale technically supports, and I believe we may settle on the proposed pill-shaped style. The pill-shaped knob satisfies the WCAG requirements because a 24-pixel-diameter circle overlaid at the center of its bounding box does not intersect with adjacent targets, such as the scale’s trough. At the same time, the pill-shaped knob does not increase the scale’s height and therefore does not introduce additional whitespace into Scale Row.

While reviewing the scale style, I noticed that an issue filed in 2024 regarding the scale not aligning with the direction of swipes on touchpads had been resolved. Thanks to Carlos, the physical direction of touchpad gestures is now correctly forwarded in GTK, and GtkRange and GtkScale already follow it. This also means that other Libadwaita widgets with semantic motion, such as NavigationView, SplitView, and Carousel, can finally follow the physical swipe direction on touchpads, regardless of whether the user has selected natural or traditional scrolling in the system settings. Alice has already opened a merge request for this change. Ideally, this change should be coordinated with the shell so that gestures such as the three-finger swipe for switching workspaces or opening the overview also follow the physical swipe direction. We also discovered a bug that causes the knob to appear off-center. The bug has technically always been present, but it was less noticeable with the circular knob.

Technically, Scale Row will be based on Action Row. Alice therefore proposed implementing a generic bottom child that also supports other use cases involving widgets below a row header. I included examples such as toggle groups in narrow layouts and a participant list in a calendar event in the mockups to account for their requirements.

A New Era for Calendar(s)

Calendar is where I started contributing to GNOME, and I have spent a lot of time designing for it over the past years. The Fellowship enables me to expand my responsibilities to other apps and shift my focus towards platform-level topics. Nevertheless, designing for Calendar will remain important. From a design perspective, it is one of the most complex GNOME apps and uses many patterns that other apps need as well. This makes it an ideal place to develop design patterns and technical solutions that benefit the entire platform.

At the beginning of September, I finalized a new version of the mockup for Calendar’s top-level app structure, based on discussions I had at GUADEC. Since 2024, we have been discussing Calendar’s top-level structure to define a roadmap for developing a fully adaptive app that works equally well on mobile and desktop. This involves several significant changes, and we have not quite reached that goal yet.

I am therefore especially excited to see multiple contributors implementing parts of the design this month. Hari implemented the new layout, Markus resumed work on his merge requests for touchscreen support and the mobile month view, and Zelda is working on the adaptive event details dialog that will replace the event details popover on mobile. Thank you all!

Recently, the first beta version of Era was released after more than a year of development. Era is a third-party calendar app developed by Titouan in close collaboration with me. You can download Era from Flathub and please report any bugs you find.

Initially, I had some concerns about duplicated development efforts, especially because GNOME Calendar is currently a thriving project with many active and skilled contributors. However, the two projects differ in several important ways that justify developing them in parallel. So far, I believe they have benefited from each other.

One of the main differences is that Era already implements my latest designs including year, month, and agenda views adapted for mobile. These views are used for navigation themselves, rather than relying on separate navigation controls. On desktop you can use the small window side-by-side with other apps for multitasking or go fullscreen for complex planning.

Under the hood, Era is written in Rust and uses Clepsydre, an extensible and modular calendar backend. It currently integrates with Evolution Data Server, while an experimental peer-to-peer backend based on p2panda is also available in development builds. Work towards Android support is underway, and an APK is available through the CI pipeline.

It’s been about a month since I started my Sovereign Tech Fellowship in mid-July, and I want to give you some updates about what’s been going on before I go on summer holiday for the next two weeks. The idea behind these update posts is to highlight certain aspects of my activities and get people interested in getting involved with design.

GUADEC 2026

• • the state of GNOME OS, an operating system that includes daily builds of all GNOME components, enabling us to identify system-level bugs before they reach distributions,
  • the new SVG renderer in GTK which enables scalable and animated icons,
  • the new symbolic icons themselves,
  • GNOME Shell design dreams, some of which are already materializing,
  • a new session save/restore framework that allows the user session and apps to save and restore their state across reboots which will enable system updates in the background without the user noticing the necessary reboot,
  • the path towards a Local-First Desktop, which highlights the potential of peer-to-peer synchronization for collaborative features in our app ecosystem,
  • the report on the journey of the Graphs app into GNOME Circle, our certification and education program for third party developers.

Kicking Things Off

Traveling to GUADEC marked the start of my fellowship, and the weeks after that I was pretty much busy with kicking off things of various kinds.

Internal

As an employee of the Sovereign Tech Agency, I went through the onboarding process, set up hardware and software tools, and got to know the team. The 2026 cohort of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship comprises 14 people from a variety of different projects, which provides an amazing opportunity to share knowledge and establish cross-project collaborations. I am responsible for organizing a monthly ‘Lightning Talks’ series, in which fellows give short presentations on topics of broader interest, with the intention of leading to longer peer mentoring sessions. For my own presentation, I chose to talk about This Week in GNOME, the GNOME project’s weekly blog that covers news from the community. I believe it is a major success because it enables our community members to share project news without having to set up their own blog. The numbers speak for themselves: a total of 2,643 news posts have been submitted by 335 individuals over a period of 261 weeks. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Felix Häcker for developing ‘This Week in GNOME’ and for curating a weekly post for more than four years.

Design

There are a few design patterns we have wanted to standardize for a while. These include Action Rows with a scale, time and date pickers, drag and drop target styling, and floating controls. I discussed with Alice which ones to prioritize and started with Action Rows with a scale. If your app uses a scale in an Action Row in a way that hasn’t been mentioned in the issue yet, please leave a comment with a screenshot. You are also welcome to contribute state-of-the-art examples from other platforms.

Another topic I plan to work on is the credentials portal and I’ve had a first video meeting with the maintainers of credentialsd to coordinate our timelines and clarify the requirements.

I also reviewed a few merge requests and provided some design feedback in issues and on Matrix. One topic I find particularly interesting and worth sharing is adjusting arbitrary colors to ensure contrast of the event widgets in Calendar. Other apps that have to handle arbitrary colors (e.g. user-selected colors) in the user interface might benefit from looking into using the oklab color space too. Alice has published a blog post about the CSS capabilities which helped me to figure out the proposal for Calendar.

Community

I’ll soon begin reviewing apps for GNOME Circle, and I’ve already had an onboarding meeting with Tobias from the Circle Committee and another interested contributor. My plan is to support new reviewers through peer reviews and feedback so they can gain experience in GNOME design.

I attended a video meeting about Test Center, a new app for installing experimental versions of apps and system components. It makes testing much easier, and I see some potential for newcomers to get involved through coordinated user testing.

Until now, I’ve never had the time to blog about my design work for GNOME, but I’ve finally set up this blog and have been really enjoying it so far. Since this is my first time blogging, I’d appreciate any feedback via Matrix.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in September after my holiday.

Hey, I’m Philipp. I’m a GNOME Design Team member and I have been contributing to GNOME design as a volunteer for several years. I’m excited to share with you that I have joined the Sovereign Tech Agency as a fellow for GNOME Design & Community Management. Check out the other fellows in the official announcement.

Introduction

I originally started contributing to GNOME to improve the software I use myself. However, what motivates me to stay involved long-term are my political values. Our modern lives, from communication and education to political discourse, are shaped by digital tools, and I believe that it’s essential for a free and democratic society to ensure free and independent access to these technologies. To achieve this goal, end-user devices based on free and open-source software are key, and the GNOME desktop and its app ecosystem offer a powerful alternative to proprietary platforms.

In recent years, I have had the privilege of joining the exceptionally skilled and motivated GNOME community as a volunteer, and have experienced how rewarding it is to contribute to a project with such a broad societal impact. At the same time, it’s been a challenge to find a balance between my job, my contributions to GNOME, and my personal life. I’ve contributed to GNOME in my free time, in the evenings, and during vacations. This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life. It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in.

Activities

During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding. The following activities may change over the course of the two-year fellowship, as I will adapt them to the needs of the community.

Community growth

I know from my own experience that it is hard to get started with GNOME design. While code contributions are often contained within the boundaries of a single app, design activities spread across multiple projects and often lack a clear entry point or primary contact. Also, not all tasks are newcomer friendly and many require cross‑project knowledge or historical context. I want to make design work more discoverable, simplify onboarding with clear contribution paths and approachable tasks, and retain contributors long term by integrating them into the community.

To attract new contributors, I will increase the visibility of design work by writing regular blog posts, giving presentations, and running workshops at conferences and hackathons. New contribution opportunities for newcomers will be created with clear instructions for independent activities such as collecting state‑of‑the‑art examples, running accessibility and user tests, and creating mockups. Design reviews will be used as mentorship opportunities, pairing regular design contributors with experienced designers for peer review and knowledge sharing. I plan to improve our team governance with clear membership criteria and focus areas, and integrate sustained contributors into the team and its processes. Finally, I want to provide grant writing support to enable contributors to sustain their contributions long-term.

Tooling improvements

User interface mockups are an important tool to communicate with developers. Outdated mockup templates, incomplete documentation, and non‑specialized software create unnecessary overhead, especially for newcomers. Therefore, I will extend and update the mockup templates for our current tool, Inkscape, and evaluate the open‑source UX design tool Penpot for managing our design system. If it proves suitable, I will build a component library to simplify mockup creation and keep assets synced with our stylesheet.

What’s next

I want to blog about my fellowship activities and design work in general, so expect regular updates here. If you’re interested in contributing to GNOME design, check out the Design Team page on the Welcome to GNOME website, familiarize yourself with the Human Interface Guidelines, and join our Matrix channel. If you’re a GNOME developer feel free to reach out to me via Matrix and involve me in design reviews.