GNOME, Endless OS, and the like
It s exciting to see the ongoing work to revitalise GNOME Online Accounts. One section of this post jumped out to me: Another big step to improving reliability and maintainability is updating to the latest dependencies and industry conventions. This meant first supporting OAuth 2.0 in a standard browser so, for example, when you log into Continue reading "Removing Online Accounts from GNOME…
Endless OS contains an optional anonymous telemetry system, where installations of the OS collect usage data and periodically send it back to us at Endless OS Foundation. Although the system is open-source, has existed in various forms for close to a decade, and individual pieces of it are documented, I don t think we ve ever written Continue reading "Endless OS s privacy-preserving metrics…
The GNOME 44 release is rushing towards us like an irate pangolin! Here is a quick roundup of some of the Endless OS Foundation team’s contributions over its six-month development cycle. Software As in the previous cycle, our team has been a key contributor to GNOME Software 44. Based on a very unscientific analysis of Continue reading "Endless contributions to GNOME 44"
I like to use the glab command-line tool, which used to be a third-party project but which has apparently now been adopted by GitLab themselves. In particular, the glab mr family of commands to interact with merge requests are invaluable for checking out branches from contributors forks. Since October 2022, GNOME s GitLab instance now has Continue reading "Using the glab CLI tool with GNOME…
One of my colleagues was recording a Zoom meeting. The session ended in such a way that the recording was left unfinished, named video2013876469.mp4.tmp. Trying to play it in Videos just gave the error “This file is invalid and cannot be played”. ffplay gave the more helpful error “moov atom not found”. It wasn t too Continue reading "Recovering a truncated Zoom meeting recording on Endless OS"
GNOME 43 is out, and as always there is lots of good stuff in there. (Me circa 2014 would be delighted to see the continuous improvements in GNOME’s built-in RDP support.) During this cycle, the OS team at Endless OS Foundation spent a big chunk of our time on other initiatives, such as bringing Endless Continue reading "GNOME 43: Endless s Part In Its Creation"
Last week I read Jorge Castro s article On “Wasting disk space” with interest, and not only because it cites one of my own articles 😉. Jorge encouraged me to write up the conversation we had off the back of it, so here we go! People like to fixate on the disk space used by installing Continue reading "Fitting Endless OS images on small disks"
Every so often I need to install Windows, most recently for my GNOME on WSL experiments, and to do this I need to write the Windows installer ISO to a USB stick. Unlike most Linux distro ISOs, these are true, pure ISO 9660 images—not hybrid images that can also be treated as a DOS/MBR disk Continue reading "Creating Windows installation media on Linux"
Today I read Comparison of Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub remotes by Hari Rana, who is an active and valued member of the Flatpak community. The article is a well-researched and well-written overview of how these two Flatpak ecosystems differ, and contains the following remark about one major difference (emphasis mine): Flathub is open with what Continue reading "How many Flathub apps reuse other…
The time I have available to maintain GNOME Initial Setup is very limited, as anyone who has looked at the commit history will have noticed. I d love more eyes hands on this important but easy-to-overlook component, particularly to guide it kindly but firmly into the modern age of GTK 4 and the refreshed HIG. Continue reading "Release (semi-)automation"