GNOME Desktop: Christian Hergert Discusses Ptyxis on Flathub, Matt Campbell on AccessKit and More, Fedora Might Demote GNOME
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GNOME ☛ Christian Hergert: Ptyxis on Flathub
You can get Ptyxis on Flathub now if you would like to run the stable version rather than Nightly. Unless you’re interested in helping QA Ptyxis or contributing that is probably the Flatpak you want to have installed.
Nightly builds of Ptyxis use the GNOME Nightly SDK meaning GTK from
main(or close to it). Living on “trunk” can be a bit painful when it goes through major transitions like is happening now with a move to Vulkan-by-default. -
LWN ☛ Modernizing accessibility for desktop Linux
In some aspects, such as in gaming, the Linux desktop has made enormous strides in the past few years. In others, such as accessibility, things have stagnated. At Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), Matt Campbell spoke about the need for, and an approach to, modernizing accessibility for desktop Linux. This included a discussion of Newton, a fledgling project that may greatly improve accessibility on the Linux desktop.
Campbell has a long history with accessibility. As he wrote in a post on the GNOME Accessibility blog, he has been working on accessibility tools for more than 20 years and is visually impaired himself. He is the lead developer of AccessKit, a project written in Rust that's designed to allow developers to implement accessibility features once in their application and have them work cross-platform with Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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LWN ☛ A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop
The change proposal was posted to the Fedora devel mailing list on behalf of the feature's owners (Joshua Strobl, Marc Deop i Argemí, Troy Dawson, Steve Cossette, Alessandro Astone) by Fedora operations architect Aoife Moloney on April 2. In short, it proposes to ""switch the default desktop experience for Workstation to KDE Plasma"" for Fedora 42, which will come in roughly a year. As one might expect, it reads like an advocacy piece about the Plasma desktop, extolling its virtues while not denigrating GNOME at all. The idea would be to swap the positions of Plasma and GNOME, keeping the GNOME edition as a separate version that would still be release-blocking; new installs would get Plasma by default, while upgrading existing systems would not switch the desktop.
The date of the post did not help with its initial reception. It was first posted on the Fedora wiki April 1, but was announced a day later on the list. That led Richard Hughes to wonder if it was an April Fools' Day joke; if so, ""it's a weird one, and a day too late"". Tomas Torcz thought the proposal made sense because Plasma seems ""more technically advanced than GNOME"", thus he did not think it is a joke. Feature owner Cossette agreed that it was not a joke; despite the timing, ""the proposal is 1000% serious"". He followed that up with some more information about the thinking of its proponents. For one thing, it was never meant to knock down GNOME; the real goal is rather different: [...]