The GNOME 50 release of our Calendar app also brings a very nice accessibility change: it’s now possible to navigate through events via the keyboard! ⌨️

In addition, many accessibility labels have been updated to improve the overall experience with screen readers.

Thanks to @TheEvilSkeleton and @zoeyTheWitch for making this happen!

#GNOME #accessibility #a11y

Big news! Today we’re launching the GNOME Fellowship: funded positions for contributors to work on the GNOME project’s long-term sustainability. 🎉

We are starting with one 12-month fellowship; applications are open through April 20.

Find out more: https://fellowship.gnome.org/

#GNOME #OpenSource #GetFediHired

The @gnome Foundation has created a program to fund direct contributions to GNOME, especially on the maintenance side.

This is excellent news, and it will make people who "only want to fund development" happy.

I also wanted to highlight that GNOME is first and foremost a community. A community that often ends up producing code, but that needs much more than a git repo to do so.

https://ergaster.org/til/gnome-fellowship/

#linux #gnome

There's a "Wayland set the Linux desktop back" blog going around now and ... it just makes me so tired.

That take is so amazingly wrong, but so persistent and popular. It is the "immigrants took mah job!" of takes for software. It is so flawed in so many different ways, and utterly ignores the host of actual reasons that Linux has stalled on the desktop.

It is apparently seductive, too, because it offloads the blame entirely on the crew developing Wayland without the person casting the blame considering for even a second the actual complexity of the problems. I could literally write a book on the reasons that the Linux desktop hasn't caught on; and I would, too, if I thought people would actually buy it and read it (a lot of people, I mean - enough to justify writing a book...)

But it boils down to this: Linux desktop development doesn't have more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the funding per year that Microsoft or Apple spend on marketing a single product line. Much less the kind of funds that go into R&D.

Vendors, mostly, are disinterested in supporting an OS that has less than 10% market share. At times they have even been actively dissuaded from doing so by certain other companies...

Users are, by and large, not willing to deal with inconvenience or having to learn new things in order to adopt the Linux desktop, even though the two main vendors are constantly making the user experience worse and continually taking away control of our own devices.

Wayland? It's a convenient scapegoat.

I'm not, by the way, arguing that Wayland is perfect, or that the community behind it has executed everything perfectly. And I'm certainly not arguing that people haven't had bad experiences with Wayland; that hasn't been _my_ experience, but I also have been using Linux for 30 years now -- and I choose hardware based on its Linux compatibility. I also have different expectations from a desktop than someone who has used Windows or macOS most of their life.

OK. Rant over. Be nicer to the Wayland folks. Stop blaming them for everything. In fact, let's maybe consider that what would really be useful is constructive takes on how we can succeed from here.