Author: Michael G

https://github.com/rhannequin/astronoby/releases/tag/v0.4.0
With accuracy and performance improvements, twilight times and new info about the Sun.

Dear members of the F-Droid community,

I am happy to make the announcement of this year’s F-Droid Board of
Directors appointments. First and foremost, thank you to everyone who made
a nomination, and to all the nominees for their interest in contributing to
F-Droid’s governance. Juliana Sims, Peter Serwylo and myself, Sebastian
Crane, have been selected for two year terms on the Board. I feel honoured
to have been chosen and look forward to serving the F-Droid community, a
sentiment I share with my fellow new arrivals:

“As a passionate free software advocate and F-Droid user, I am delighted to bring my experience with community organizing and moderation to the Board in order to help the F-Droid project and community continue to grow equitably and inclusively into the future.”
– Juliana Sims

“F-Droid is an extremely important part of the free software ecosystem.
With so many people carrying powerful computers in their pockets, it is more important than ever to have a strong free software alternative to the proprietary app stores, walled gardens, and adware found elsewhere.
I’m constantly amazed by what the F-Droid team and community have achieved, and look forward to serving on the board, bringing my software development and computer science background to help the project grow.”
– Peter Serwylo

Not only will this bring new perspectives to the Board, but it will also
enhance its geographic diversity. Peter lives in Australia, Juliana is on
the USA’s Eastern Seaboard, and I hail from Britain. That means two
countries hitherto unrepresented on the Board of Directors, and our first
director from south of the Equator! This is especially welcome given how
F-Droid is part of the global movement of Free and Open Source Software
(FOSS).

As originally planned, Max Mehl, one the founding directors of the Board, is
leaving. I am sure I speak for the whole F-Droid community in wanting to
express gratitude for his service to the project. Max has a few words with
which to bid the Board farewell:

“I would like to thank the F-Droid community and my fellow Board members for giving me the opportunity to serve on the founding Board.
Having been an avid user since the early days of F-Droid, this role has made the often time-consuming and tedious background tasks much more transparent to me.
So my greatest appreciation goes to the volunteers who put so much long-term work into F-Droid!

My wish and hope is that the Board will continue to reduce the friction for current and future F-Droid contributors, while at the same time professionalising the handling of incidents and conflicts.
I am confident that the Board in its new composition has everything it takes to succeed.”
– Max Mehl

Andrew Lewman and Matthias Kirschner continue their two-year terms as
directors, and Hans-Christoph Steiner continues his two-year term as
Technical Lead (a non-director role advisory to the Board). Showing their
belief in F-Droid, Morgan Lemmer-Webber, John Sullivan and Michael Downey
volunteered to continue after their initial one-year terms and have
subsequently been re-elected. This will help to maintain continuity in what
is the first change to the Board’s composition since its founding, and
brings the total number of directors to eight, up from six directors during
the Board’s first year.

Since its formation, the F-Droid Board of Directors has had four designated
roles, namely that of Chair, Vice Chair, Clerk and Treasurer. Although none
of the directors holding these positions are leaving, the Board has chosen
to introduce one additional role and reassign an existing one: Peter will
take the newly-created position of Vice Clerk, and I will succeed Morgan as
the Chair. John, Andrew and Michael will continue in their capacities of
Vice Chair, Clerk and Treasurer respectively.

The Board is therefore now composed as follows:

• Sebastian Crane (Chair) – until 2026
• Michael Downey (Treasurer) – reappointed, until 2025
• Matthias Kirschner – until 2025
• Morgan Lemmer-Webber – reappointed, until 2025
• Andrew Lewman (Clerk) – until 2025
• Peter Serwylo (Vice Clerk) – until 2026
• Juliana Sims – until 2026
• Hans-Christoph Steiner – ex officio, until 2026
• John Sullivan (Vice Chair) – reappointed, until 2026

During 2024, the Board of Directors intends to form new subcommittees to
establish additional points of liaison between the Board and those
interested in specific aspects of F-Droid’s activities (fundraising, for
instance). If the prospect of participating in such discussions interests
you, please keep an eye out for further announcements! Board meetings
continue to be open to the entire community, and will be announced in
advance on the F-Droid Forum.

Best regards,

Sebastian Crane on behalf of the F-Droid Board of Directors

Anyone who has spent any time recently using non-GNOME GTK desktop environments, like Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, has had to deal with the unfortunate reality of a lot of GTK applications becoming GNOME applications instead, using GNOME’s own libadwaita. These applications are hard to theme, and do not integrate at all with the proper GTK applications non-GNOME desktop environments ship with. With how popular GNOME is, this has meant that the number of non-GNOME GTK applications has been dwindling. Linux Mint, the popular Linux distribution that also develops the Cinnamon desktop environment, has long made a bundle of GTK applications called XApps – basically forks of various core GNOME 3.x applications to ensure they would have access to non-GNOME GTK applications. With GNOME effectively forking GTK into its own, unique, GNOME-specific style (like libaidwaita), other GTK environments have suffered, and XApps were intended to close that gap. That hasn’t really happened though, as XApps remained mostly a Mint-only thing, managed by Mint, as part of the Mint/Cinnamon GitHub projects. Other distributions and GTK desktop environments, such as Xfce, MATE, Budgie, and so on, didn’t really pick them up. The Linux Mint project intends to change that, and will ‘spin off’ the XApps into its own, dedicated, independent project to facilitate cross-distribution and cross-DE collaboration, decision-making and development, all in an effort to ensure the long-term viability of non-GNOME GTK desktop environments. They also intend to fork a lot more of the GNOME 3 applications, for the same reason I mentioned earlier: GNOME applications are no longer GTK applications, but GNOME applications – they look and feel horribly out of place in environments that don’t use the GNOME-specific libadwaita. As such, Celluloid, GNOME Calculator, Simple Scan, Baobab, System Monitor, GNOME Calendar, File Roller, and Zenity were recently downgraded in Linux Mint to their last GTK 3 versions, and will most likely be forked in the near future. In addition, the Adwaita theme, the default GNOME/GTK theme, will be removed from the list of available themes in Cinnamon 6.2. Adwaita, too, has become increasingly GNOME-only, and thus, increasingly broken on non-GNOME desktop environments. Flat-our removing Adwaita altogether is not possible, since it’s a GTK dependency, but hiding it from the theme selector is not an issue, of course. As project lead Clément Lefèbvre writes: libAdwaita is for GNOME and GNOME only. We can’t blame GNOME for this, they’ve been very clear about it from the start. It was made specifically for GNOME to have more freedom and build its own ecosystem without impacting GTK. We want to send a strong signal upstream and towards other projects. We cannot and will not support applications which do not support our users and environments. We can’t promote applications to our users which don’t support our users. The software manager will be vigilant towards that going forward and list compatible software by default. ↫ Clément Lefèbvre All of this is great news to hear. I’ve been making extensive use of Xfce on OpenBSD lately, and on the Fedora Xfce spin in the weeks before that, and the situation has become almost comical. If you install any GNOME application on Xfce, theming just breaks down completely, as most themes are either not made to support the massive headerbars GNOME uses, or they do support it but still look horribly out of place compared to the more sane titlebar plus menubar plus toolbar layout of traditional desktop environments like Xfce. I’ve long been saying that the non-GNOME GTK desktop environments need to work together to formulate an answer to the onslaught of libadwaita and the GNOME-ification of GTK, because each of them risks becoming entirely tied to whatever GNOME and libadwaita decides to do, for better or worse. It seems the Linux Mint team has finally realised this as well, and I really hope – and strongly suggest – Xfce, MATE, and others join them as well. If they don’t, there won’t be an Xfce in a few years. What’s the point in developing Xfce if you’re at the mercy of whatever choices GNOME makes?