Two weeks ago, I released AppStream 1.2.0. This release contains a lot of great changes, but one of the most important ones concerns how media are being handled, and AppStream’s default image export format. AppStream is a Freedesktop metadata standard to describe software components. That can be anything from system services over fonts to console […]
Tag: xdg
Sovereign Tech Fellowship for Freedesktop Tasks
In 2025 I was honored to be selected for the first cohort of Sovereign Tech Fellows, a program by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency to improve the resilience of the open source ecosystem by supporting maintainers directly (complementing their existing support for larger FOSS organizations). Back in 2025, I was only working very limited hours – […]
Hello old new “Projects” directory!
If you have recently installed a very up-to-date Linux distribution with a desktop environment, or upgraded your system on a rolling-release distribution, you might have noticed that your home directory has a new folder: “Projects” Why? With the recent 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs we enabled the “Projects” directory by default. Support for this has already […]
Maintain release info easily in MetaInfo/Appdata files
This article isn’t about anything “new”, like the previous ones on AppStream – it rather exists to shine the spotlight on a feature I feel is underutilized. From conversations it appears that the reason simply is that people don’t know that it exists, and of course that’s a pretty bad reason not to make your […]
Translated AppStream metadata for KDE!
It took some time, but now it’s finally done: KDE has translations for AppStream upstream metadata! AppStream is a Freedesktop project to extend metadata about the software projects which is available in distributions, especially regarding applications. Distributions compile a metadata file from data collected from packages, .desktop files and possibly other information sources, and create […]
Appstream: The next step
With the release of GNOME-Software 3.12, it’s also time for another update about what is going on behind the scenes of Appstream, the project providing all the data needed to make software-centers work. So here is the long overdue update 🙂 If you have attended my FOSDEM talk or seen the slides, you know about […]
AppStream Clarifications
While reading stuff posted by others about AppStream, and because of the discussion happening about AppData on kde-core-devel right now, I feel the need to clarify a few things. Especially because some are implementing AppStream in a way which is not really ideal right now. This is to some extend my fault, because I should […]
Release-o-Rama
Many awesome new releases have been made this week so far! PackageKit 0.8.4 The new PackageKit features lots of bugfixes and small improvements. It also contains a few new features, like showing PolicyKit dialogs on the command-line, even if no GUI is running. If you want to try the new PackageKit and are a Debian […]
Summer of Code beendet
Der Google Summer of Code ist beendet. Die Zeit – vor allem kurz vor der Deadline – war super intensiv und ich habe noch nie mehr für ein OpenSource-Projekt innerhalb einer so kurzen Zeit getan wie im SoC, insofern ein großes Dankeschön an Google, dass sie mich gesponsert haben und das Ganze überhaupt möglich gemacht […]
Listaller Project – To infinity and beyond!
Nearly everyone who’s reading this blog will know about Listaller, a project started by me to make cross-distro 3rd-party software installations possible & secure. This project has been started years ago, and lots of things have changed in the Linux desktop world and down the stack, so I think it is time to look back […]