Ximions Blog

Two weeks ago, I released AppStream 1.2.0.

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 suppo…

For almost two decades, the PackageKit package management abstraction layer has shipped with pkcon as its command-line client. pkcon does its job, but it was always kind of a “testing” front-end for the PackageKit daemon rather than a tool designed for ev…

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?

The Freedesktop.org Specifications directory contains a list of common specifications that have accumulated over the decades and define how common desktop environment functionality works.

This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?

Today, 12 years after the meeting where AppStream was first discussed and 11 years after I released a prototype implementation I am excited to announce AppStream 1.0!

At the moment I am hard at work putting together the final bits for the AppStream 1.0 release (hopefully to be released this month).

On the road to AppStream 1.0, a lot of items from the long todo list have been done so far – only one major feature is remaining, external release descriptions, which is a tricky one to implement and specify.

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.