As we enter May, we’re excited to announce that Endless OS 6 is available now as a free upgrade for existing users and a free download for new installations! Let’s take a look at what’s new and improved in the latest release of our completely free, user-friendly operating system packed with educational tools, games, and more.

New Features On Endless OS 6

Endless OS 6 remains both familiar to existing users and easy to learn for new users while sporting a few new features and refinements to the experience.

Dark Style & Refined Look

My favorite new feature is the new dark style preference that switches the system into a dark, night-friendly look that’s easier on the eyes in dark environments. Whether you use your computer at night or just prefer the look of a dark style, give it a try from Settings → Appearance or the refreshed system menu at the top-right of the screen.

The new dark style is made possible by a refined look and feel across all the core apps like Files, App Center, Settings, and more that sport a new, flatter design that adapts to both light and dark styles. You’ll notice improved contrast and a more consistent feel across apps.

Since it’s based on established standards, the dark style also works in web browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, GNOME Web, and Chromium, and applies to many third-party apps downloaded from App Center.

Improved Screenshots & Screen Recording

Endless OS 6 comes with a redesigned, easier to use, and more interactive screenshot and screen recording experience. Tapping the PrintScr key or the new icon in the system menu brings up an interactive menu to select an area, app, or screen to take a screenshot or recording of. It even remembers the area you select between uses, making it even easier to take several screenshots for comparison.

It might seem like a niche thing, but we think you’ll like it the next time you want to share a screenshot or recording of something on your screen.

New & Updated Apps

Rounding out the new features in Endless OS 6 are a few new and updated apps. For new installs of Endless OS 6, you’ll now get the clean and simple Music app for listening to a local library plus the new Decibels app to listen to one-off audio files, e.g. to preview a downloaded voicemail or other recording.

Meanwhile, Image Viewer has been updated with a cleaner look, wider image format support including modern formats like HEIC/HEIF and WebP, improved performance, and better support for multi-touch gestures like pinch-to-zoom on touchpads and touchscreens.

Users upgrading from Endless OS 5 will get the new Image Viewer automatically, while the Music and Decibels apps can be installed from App Center.

Under-the-Hood

Endless OS 6 brings substantial underlying updates to the OS. Without getting too nerdy (see the release notes if that’s your thing), updates to the core of Endless OS 6 bring:

• improved hardware support

• improved audio handling, especially for Bluetooth devices

• many security updates and bug fixes

We’ve also improved how Endless OS 6 handles low-memory situations. As a result, you’ll be able to multi-task quite a bit more now before the OS starts closing apps when running on older hardware or less powerful systems.

Game Making

Learning by gaming and making video games has long been a passion of Endless, and with Endless OS 6 we're doubling down on that passion. Endless OS 6 comes with a vast collection of game-making apps and tools right with the full download—tools that work right out of the box, offline, and for a wide range of experience levels.

You get all the creative tools you need to create assets for games from backgrounds and sprites to 3D models and a soundtrack. For example, you can jump right into Blender, the 3D creation suite for modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and video editing, plus:

• Audacity: the world's most popular audio editing and recording app

• Blender Tutorials: learn fundamental tools and concepts in Blender

• GNU Image Manipulation Program: full-featured photo editing, image manipulation, and digital painting

• Inkscape: rich vector graphics editor for illustration, sprite creation, and more

• Pixelorama: 2D sprite editor with animation support

On the coding and development side, Endless OS comes with everything from intro-level block coding to a professional engine. We’re proud to include Godot Engine, the professional-level game engine to easily create 2D and 3D games, plus:

• GDevelop: no-code game development software for fast and easy game-making

• Scratch: create stories, games, and animations with block-based coding

• TurtleBlocks: draw colorful pictures with snap-together visual programming blocks

Endless OS 6 continues to come with educational games, as well. They’re not just time-wasters; these games are explicitly designed to help teach concepts of coding and game development:

• Aqueducts: immersive puzzle adventure game where you hack your way to saving the day, learning and practicing variables, conditionals, loops, debugging, JavaScript, math, step by step, booleans, logical sequencing, and more

• Dragon's Apprentice: RPG-like puzzle-solving dungeon-crawling game that teaches code blocks, loops, conditionals, and more

• Fablemaker: interactive stories where you can customize characters, text, and sounds, hacking into its code in this absorbing and educational app

• Frog Squash: help animals survive dangerous obstacles by designing your own AI, learning loops, and controlling conditionals

• The Passage: Hack your way through this side scrolling action adventure shooting game

• Tank Warriors: Driving, shooting, explosions, and programming all in one game

Get Endless OS 6

Endless OS 6 is a free upgrade for existing users; if you’re already on Endless OS, head to App Center and check for updates to get the latest version. For everyone else, you can download Endless OS 6 for free, or read the release notes to learn more.

Thank you to the free and open source projects and communities of Linux, Debian, and GNOME for many of the improvements we’re shipping in Endless OS 6. We strongly believe in open source, and would not be able to have the impact we do without standing on the shoulders of the projects we build upon.

Cassidy is passionate about helping design and build useful, usable, and delightful products using open technologies. In the past he co-founded elementary OS and served as the chief experience architect, and he's worked as a UX architect, web developer, and writer—and worn many, many other hats. He contributes to GNOME and Flatpak.

Outside of work and open source he enjoys mobile photography, playing video games, watching and reading almost everything Star Wars, and being a dad.

Hello everybody,

First things first, a big thank you to all our sponsors and donors. Many thanks to you and to all the people who support our project. I know we say it every month, but it’s important.

Fastly powered repositories

Earlier this month we announced a BETA test for our new Fastly repositories. This is a long test. The more people join it, the better.

BETA Test: Fastly repositories

We’re working with Fastly on a partnership to power the next generation of Linux Mint repositories. Their CDN (Content Delivery Network) and its caching mechanism are extremely impressive. Unlike our repository servers which are located in one place and have a maximum bandwidth capacity, the Fastly network replicates and caches data to make it available anywhere in the World, consistently at fast speed, without downtime or slow-downs.

To give you an idea, a single Linux Mint server currently serves data from Chicago at 1Gbps. The further away you are from Chicago the slower it might be for you. When the load is high (during a release or during a peak of important security updates affecting large packages), the server serves more people at the same time and so its 1Gbps bandwidth gets shared/divided between all the people who try to get data from it. When there are too many people trying to update, we get really slow speeds or even errors.

When Linux Mint started in 2006 our bandwidth needs were relatively modest. As the project grew year after year, the servers were upgraded to have more and more resources and allow for higher bandwidth. We also set up multiple servers and balanced the load between them. This allowed us to increase our capacity and face higher and higher loads. But the problem remains, it just depends on the load.

The Fastly network allows us to address the issue in a much better way. First, Fastly has servers in many different places in the World, so it no longer matters if you’re close or far from our servers. The data is cached by the Fastly network and serves efficiently anywhere. Second, because the data is cached, Fastly is able to provide it even when/if our servers become unreachable.

We’re hoping this test will be a success and lead to a great partnership with Fastly. Don’t hesitate to join the test and give us your feedback.

New partnership with Datadog

We are thrilled to announce a new partnership with Datadog.

Datadog specializes in… data. It’s not just monitoring and log analysis, they provide an incredibly customizable set of tools which lets you define your own parsers, metrics, dimensions and basically get the information you want, analyzed and monitored in real time.

The stats we shared last month, which showed the popularity of each Linux Mint edition, were powered by Datadog.

Datadog could make us understand our own services better. What are the most downloaded packages in our repositories? Which versions? How big is i386? Where is most of the bandwidth going? When during the week? etc.

Note: This data comes from the traffic on the download pages of our website. We do not collect any telemetry inside the OS.

Joining the Matrix

Following the discontinuation of Hexchat we announced efforts to make IRC easier with the development of a new custom chat room application called Jargonaut.

Jargonaut works. It works well and does exactly what we want. Its implementation was relatively easy and I’d say it’s now 75% complete.

When we announced it though, we heard some of your feedback about Matrix. We tested that as well and started using it.

Today we’re announcing we’ll be moving to Matrix and integrating Element into Mint 22 instead of Jargonaut.

While being as open as IRC, Matrix provides a user experience which is similar to Slack or Discord to some extent. It’s modern, it’s persistent, and simply by being modern and persistent it’s actually less confusing to newcomers than an extremely simple application like Jargonaut which connects you to a room without even having to log in.

Matrix also feels future-proof. It has everything it needs to be backed by the FOSS community at large. Its specifications continue to evolve. Its many clients provide a variety of choices today on different platforms and if we ever needed to make a custom client in the future it would be possible as well.

With a bit of integration, Matrix can be simple too. Mint 22 will feature a preinstalled Web App called Matrix.

That Web App will show you some information to help you get started:

And then it will connect you to the Linux Mint space on Matrix using a Web client called Element:

The Web App will be present in the WebApp Manager. If you want to use a different Matrix client, you’ll be able to modify it or delete it.

Of course, you don’t need to wait for Mint 22 to connect to the Linux Mint space on Matrix. You can simply head over to https://app.element.io/#/room/#linuxmint-space:matrix.org.

XApp should be independent

Linux Mint is the largest consumer of XApp applications, but the reason XApp was created, as a project, was to make these applications work everywhere and for everybody. Whenever a new XApp application was started, the goal was specifically to NOT make it Linux Mint and/or Cinnamon specific.

At a time where GNOME applications are less and less designed to work anywhere else than in GNOME, a project like XApp is extremely important.

Was it a success outside of Linux Mint though? Yes and no. Many Xapps are available in other distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc..) but very few distributions actually make use of them.

Take Xubuntu for instance. It used to ship with file-roller, gnome-calculator, evince. These applications moved to libAdwaita (more on that in the next paragraph) and now look completely out of place in Xfce so Xubuntu replaced them with engrampa, mate-calc, atril..

For GNOME-Scan, it couldn’t find alternatives though.

This is GNOME-Scan and Atril side by side in Xubuntu 24.04:

This isn’t ideal for Xubuntu. These applications are installed by default, this is how it looks out of the box.

Before I go on with this, I want to say this isn’t criticism directed at Xubuntu. As an official Ubuntu derivative they cannot ship with a previous version of GNOME Scan, and I think it’s partly our fault they got in this situation.

So on the right you have Atril which looks like all the other apps in Xubuntu 24.04, and on the left you’ve got an app which has nothing to do here and which is designed to integrate specifically with GNOME Shell.

To add to the issue, although MATE apps such as mate-calc work everywhere, they were designed for MATE, so if you open up the application menu you don’t see “Calculator” in your Xubuntu desktop, but “MATE Calculator”.

Now, why is it partly our fault? Because we never knocked on Xfce’s door and/or worked with them.

They have the same problems as us, as MATE, as Budgie, as many other desktops.. we made Xapps because we needed them in Mint, in Cinnamon. We didn’t want to make Cinnamon apps, so we made “Linux” apps which worked “everywhere”, we wrote it somewhere and we left it that.

It was enough for us, but it wasn’t enough for Xubuntu or other desktops. From their point of view they saw Linux Mint making something in their own little corner and putting it on github.com/linuxmint, or even worse they saw nothing at all.

What should have happened ideally would have been more communication and an independent XApp project, not hosted or maintained by Linux Mint, but by people from various desktop and/or distributions.

XApp should be its own organization, with its own github repositories, chat room, website, etc. It should be a space which facilitates collaboration, compatibility and the development of application which works everywhere, not just apps which are needed or maintained by us.

If we want other developers and other projects to work together on compatible software and common solutions, we need a space like XApp. But this space needs to be independent of any DE and any distribution for everyone to feel equal and to feel welcome. Not just on paper, but in general, in discussions, empowerment and decision-making.

Xapp is on Matrix at https://matrix.to/#/#xapp:matrix.org. Everyone is welcome.

libAdwaita is for GNOME only

No matter what happens upstream, we will always do our best to make each Linux Mint release a better experience than the one you already have. Applications will be native and look native. They will integrate well. If we let you choose a desktop theme, ALL installed applications will support it.

If an application doesn’t support Cinnamon we can’t ship with it in our Cinnamon edition. The same goes for MATE and Xfce.

It would be completely unacceptable for us to ship with an application which used its own window controls and didn’t follow the system theme. Looking at it long-term, we also do not want our apps to be designed by people who have no consideration for what is important to us, and whose decisions are motivated by a desktop we don’t even use.

This is File Roller 3.42. This application has always been labeled as “for GNOME”, but it integrated well in any GTK desktop. With File Roller 44 this is no longer the case. It looks just like GNOME Scan in the previous screenshot. It’s not made for MATE, Cinnamon or Xfce and it really shows.

By moving to GTK4/libAdwaita this app really became a GNOME app, an app which looks specifically designed for GNOME and nothing else.

So what do we do in Linux Mint 22?

We could do like Ubuntu 24.04. They provide a finished product with a high level of integration. The way they do that is by modifying libAdwaita to support their theme: Yaru. We could do the same with Mint-Y. It would make all GNOME applications look nice in Linux Mint, but we’d have to remove theme selection, since it would only work with Mint-Y. In the long term it wouldn’t solve the main issue either: These applications are designed for a desktop which is more and more different to ours by the day. It’s not just a question of themes or look. Today these apps are losing menubars, themes, tomorrow they might come with no minimize button or anything GNOME doesn’t use.

We didn’t want to fork a whole suite of apps right now. Not with the upcoming major release and not before we try to make XApp more independent and boost collaboration with other projects.

In Mint 22 GNOME Font Viewer was removed and the following applications were downgraded back to GTK3 versions:

• Celluloid
• GNOME Calculator
• Simple Scan
• Baobab
• System Monitor
• GNOME Calendar
• File Roller
• Zenity

These applications are very likely to be forked in the near future, except for Zenity which we’ll probably stop using altogether.

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.

I want to reach out to upstream developers here. If your application is only for GNOME, then by all means, ignore this and use libAdwaita, it’s made for that.

If you intend to support all environments then don’t use this library. At the very least please get in touch with us so we’re aware of your intention and keep you listed as a supported app. You can reach us at https://matrix.to/#/#linuxmint-dev:matrix.org.

Adwaita no longer works outside of GNOME

Adwaita (the theme) will be removed from the list of available themes in Cinnamon 6.2.

Here is the Adwaita icon theme in Ubuntu 24.04:

As you can see the theme provides icons for some categories (Internet, Accessories..etc) but not others. Many icons are missing, the desktop looks completely broken and it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. The direction Adwaita is taking is to only support GNOME and nothing else.

It would be OK if we could remove Adwaita or not ship with it, but we can’t. GTK depends on it.

Budgie didn’t wait for it to break and blacklisted Adwaita 2 years ago. We’re doing it now in Cinnamon. MATE and Xfce should probably do it since it looks just as bad on any non-GNOME desktop.

Flatpak verification is extremely important

In Linux Mint, is it safe to open up the Software Manager and install Google Chrome? Yes? No? Well.. it depends, and it has nothing to do with how much you trust Linux Mint, or Google.

You need to trust refi64 because it isn’t Mint or Google who update the Flatpak for Chrome, it’s someone who goes by the name of “refi64” on the Internet.

Now as it happens, refi64 is very nice developer. The problem isn’t refi64. The problem is that amongst the 6 million people who installed his Flatpak, very few people know who refi64 is.

In Flathub, a verified app is an app that is published by its original developer or a third party approved by the developer. Chrome is published by refi64 and is therefore “unverified”.

Right now, 42% of Flatpaks have been verified by Flathub. The store is actively trying to verify apps, especially now after the XZ story and the multiple times malware was injected in the Snap Store.

This is Chrome in the Linux Mint Software Manager:

There isn’t a single mention of refi64 here.

The situation online on the Flathub website is a little bit better:

The app is shown as “Unverified” but you still have to dig to find who’s maintaining it.

We’ve been lucky so far. We really need to take action:

• We’ll update the Software Manager to not show unverified Flatpaks by default. This will be an opt-in.
• When shown, unverified apps will have a score of 0. The score can help a user build trust towards the application, but the issue here isn’t the application, it’s the fact that the maintainers aren’t who people think they are.
• When shown, unverified apps will be clearly marked as unverified.

We’re fully aware this goes against convenience and will hurt Linux Mint a little bit. It might not be a popular decision but we think it’s a very important one.

By the time malware hits Flathub, we hope these measures and the measures taken by Flathub will have minimized the number of exposed users and raised awareness around the risks which are being taken.

In the case of XZ, the maintainer would have been “verified”. What worked for us was the vigilance of upstream developers and the time it took for new code to make its way into Linux Mint. The malware in XZ affected Debian Sid but it never made its way into Debian Stable, or Ubuntu LTS or Linux Mint.

Unlike the Debian base which takes months or even years to stabilize and reach you here, a Flatpak updated by its maintainer can reach millions of users almost instantaneously. We recommend automated updates, also for security reasons. When it comes to Flatpak the risk isn’t just taken at installation time, it’s taken with every update, at a time when you might not even think about Flatpaks. This is more risky than Windows users downloading software from random websites. It’s supported by the update manager.

You REALLY need to trust where you get your software from and in our own Software Manager we don’t show you the info you need to make informed decisions.

We’ll address this ASAP. Thank you for your attention on this important topic.

Edit: Refi64 wasn’t aware his identity was publicly available and asked for his real name not to be published. This article was edited to remove it.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

Donations in March:

A total of $9,626 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 302 donors:

$1200 (8th donation), Abigail M.
$216, Luca P.
$200, John R.
$162, Karsten K.
$162, Thomas Metzinger
$150 (5th donation), Scott G.
$128, Christopher B.
$120 (4th donation), George C.
$120, Christopher L.
$108 (4th donation), Michael F.
$108 (3rd donation), Franky W.
$108, Endris
$108, Jean-pierre V.
$108, Michael K.
$100 (6th donation), Robin S.
$100 (5th donation), Brittany Taylor F.
$100 (3rd donation), Charlotte B.
$100, Douglas P.
$100, John R.
$100, Larry M.
$100, Rich B.
$100, Vaughn A.
$95, Jérôme G.
$80, Brendan Gilet Graphic Design
$59, Julie M.
$54 (18th donation), David M.
$54 (9th donation), Volker P.
$54 (4th donation), Reg O.
$54 (4th donation), Robert H. M.
$54 (3rd donation), Hubert F.
$54 (3rd donation), Jan Sepp
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$54 (3rd donation), Philippe Robert aka “phsrobert”
$54 (2nd donation), Christian S.
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$54 (2nd donation), Siegfried S.
$54, Brian T.
$54, Christina R.
$54, Jürgen N.
$54, Konrad T.
$54, Laurent B.
$54, Leo P.
$54, Philippe A.
$54, Ryan M.
$54, Urs K.
$54, Yvo D.
$52 (7th donation), John Mc
$50 (82th donation), Anthony C. aka “ciak”
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$50, Denis B.
$50, Erik M.
$50, Glenna D.
$50, Jeff M.
$40, Thomas L. aka “Calvicii”
$39 (2nd donation), Online Biz Builders SEO
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$32 (10th donation), Mark A.
$32 (5th donation), Andrew C.
$32 (4th donation), 974_RUN
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$32, Bruno L.
$32, Harry F.
$30 (4th donation), Kevin H.
$30 (3rd donation), Carl T.
$30 (2nd donation), Ron N. aka “TechNick”
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$27, Rafael M.
$25 (37th donation), Linux Mint Sverige
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$25 (2nd donation), John S.
$25 (2nd donation), Tim S.
$25, Anthony C.
$25, ATV Brakes N More
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$25, Kelvin W.
$25, Ross B.
$23 (2nd donation), Paul F.
$22 (46th donation), Peter E.
$22 (11th donation), Francois B. aka “Makoto”
$22 (9th donation), Marek S. [LMDE SUPPORTER]
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$22, Franco H.
$22, Gerhard K.
$22, Jan Z.
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$22, Jose Luis D.
$22, Leena N.
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$22, Xabier A.
$20 (46th donation), Stefan M. H.
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$20 (11th donation), Uncle Geek
$20 (10th donation), Robert D. aka “MacDhai”
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$20 (3rd donation), Christian M. aka “manygave”
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$20, David B.
$20, Edward R K.
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$20, Financial Advisor Diddel & Diddel
$20, Harry B.
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$20, Jason M.
$20, Jesse G.
$20, Karen L.
$20, Kimberly L.
$20, Marion P.
$20, Mark D.
$20, Paul C.
$20, Peter M.
$20, Ross B.
$16 (74th donation), Andreas S.
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$16 (2nd donation), Martin B.
$15 (3rd donation), Terry P.
$15, Ewan T. aka “Blinks7588”
$11 (93th donation), Johann J.
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$11 (21st donation), Denys G.
$11 (16th donation), Adis H.
$11 (15th donation), Peter R.
$11 (13th donation), Christian B.
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$11 (11th donation), Stefan W.
$11 (10th donation), François L.
$11 (10th donation), Karlheinz R.
$11 (9th donation), Darius O.
$11 (8th donation), Thomas R.
$11 (7th donation), Ivo H.
$11 (5th donation), Kjerkreit Ytre, Anders Kiær
$11 (5th donation), Joel E.
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$11 (4th donation), Jan Z.
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$11 (3rd donation), Karl-heinz P.
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$11, Daniel C.
$11, Georg G.
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$11, Joan P.
$11, John F.
$11, Klaus B.
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$11, Lorenzo P.
$11, Maurizio D.
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$11, Tim M.
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$10 (96th donation), Thomas C.
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$10 (5th donation), Carl T.
$10 (4th donation), Conrad M.
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$10, B R S.
$10, Barbara W.
$10, Barry M.
$10, Computronix
$10, Computronix Managed IT Support & Cyber Security
$10, David N.
$10, Edward G.
$10, George R.
$10, H2Z45Y2K
$10, Luke P.
$10, Oleksandr O.
$10, Paul B.
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We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected seven contributors to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.

Here are the list of the projects, students, and details of the tasks to be performed.

Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian

• Student: anuragxone

Deliverables of the project: Make the entire Android toolchain, Android Target Platform Framework, and SDK tools available in the Debian archives.

Project: Benchmarking Parallel Performance of Numerical MPI Packages

• Student: Nikolaos

Deliverables of the project: Deliver an automated method for Debian maintainers to test selected numerical Debian packages for their parallel performance in clusters, in particular to catch performance regressions from updates, and to verify expected performance gains, such as Amdahl’s and Gufstafson’s law, from increased cluster resources.

Project: Debian MobCom

• Student: Nathan D

Deliverables of the project: Update the outdated mobile packages and recreate aged packages due to new dependencies. Bring in more mobile communication tools by adding about 5 new packages.

Project: Improve support of the Rust coreutils in Debian

• Student: Sreehari Prasad TM

Deliverables of the project: Make uutils behave more like GNU’s coreutils by improving compatibility with GNU coreutils test suit.

Project: Improve support of the Rust findutils in Debian

• Student: hanbings

Deliverables of the project: A safer and more performant implementation of the GNU suite's xargs, find, locate and updatedb tools in rust.

Project: Expanding ROCm support within Debian and derivatives

• Student: xuantengh

Deliverables of the project: Building, packaging, and uploading missing ROCm software into Debian repositories, starting with simple tools and progressing to high-level applications like PyTorch, with the final deliverables comprising a series of ROCm packages meeting community quality assurance standards.

Project: procps: Development of System Monitoring, Statistics and Information Tools in Rust

• Student: Krysztal Huang

Deliverables of the project: Improve the usability of the entire Rust-based implementation of the procps utility on Linux.

Congratulations and welcome to all the contributors!

The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor contributors and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the contributors' weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.

We can have a different web

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As a lifelong lover of the web, it's hard not to feel a little hopeless right now.

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.¹ Within those enclosures, the character limits, neutered subset of web functionality, and constant push to satisfy the enigmatic desires of an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform encourage sameness, vapid engagement farming, and rage bait while stifling creativity.

Newspapers, whose evolution towards online models once stoked optimism for more accessible and dynamic journalism that could lead to a more informed and democratically engaged citizenry, have become luxury goods as aggressive paywalls and expensive subscription models are increasingly deployed by the hedge funds and other profit-hungry entities that control these papers. Some use the excuse that they're trying to protect their journalism from the unsanctioned scraping by companies training ever-hungrier artificial intelligence models. Yet those same media outlets hasten their own demise with wave after wave of layoffs, or by chasing harebrained schemes like churning out tedious clickbait or their own AI-generated soup even as their executives continue to cash huge checks.

Many websites now require one to steel themselves for battle against the advertisements and trackers and GDPR cookie consent popups and AI-powered chatbot windows that interrupt you to offer to helpfully bungle whatever you ask of them. AdBlock is no longer optional, and even with it, trackers and advertisements slither through the cracks. Browsing the web brings with it the ever-present feeling that you're being watched — your activities and preferences and habits all being logged and funneled into a giant vat of horrifying data soup, all just to help more companies serve you more of these intrusive ads that you must endlessly swat away as you try to find whatever it was you were looking for.

It is tempting, amid all of this decay, to yearn for the good old days.

The emergence of online chat and instant messaging, where you used some acronym-named chat like ICQ or IRC or AOL messenger to talk to friends you knew in real life or anonymous strangers all over the globe. Those phpBB forums and message boards on sites like GameFAQs — or, for some, the BBSes and Usenet newsgroups that predated them. The flash games and the whimsical GeoCities sites full of dancing hamsters and the MySpace pages full of garish, hand-coded styles and glitter GIFs and auto-playing MIDI tracks.

Those incredibly specific websites created by one guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of something really niche, or the labors of love that were fansites dedicated to The X Files or the Backstreet Boys.

Some of this is nostalgia for our younger years, I think. According to my very scientific Twitter and Mastodon polls, around 60% and 42% (respectively) of people happened to be under 20 years old during the period they identified as the "good old days".

It may be that we are, at least in part, yearning for the days when logging on to the internet was less likely to mean going to work or paying a bill and more likely to mean playing Runescape or hoping that the green circle on AIM would light up next to the name of our crush after school.

But some of this is certainly based in the feeling that the web was just better back then. Fewer trolls, and a lot fewer bots. Google search results that actually returned what you were looking for, not just the sites that paid the most. Cobbled-together blogs and LiveJournal pages written by people who felt authentic, who maybe wanted to attract more visitors to tick up their pageview counters or add entries to their guestbook pages, but who weren't trying to cultivate a persona as an influencer or a thought leader, "build a brand", or monetize their audience. More of a neighborhood feeling where everyone was a possible friend, and less fear that people might interpret your social media post as uncharitably as possible. The worry that the girl you were talking to might be a man pretending to be a girl, but probably not the fear that she's a crypto romance scammer or part of a state-sponsored disinformation network. Fewer and less intrusive ads, less engagement farming, less surveillance. Fewer paywalls, more "information wants to be free".

The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

When I envision the web, I picture an infinite expanse of empty space that stretches as far as the eye can see. It's full of fertile soil, but no seeds have taken root. That is, except for about an acre of it.

Years ago, in the web's early days, people entered this infinite expanse and began to cultivate it. First it was the scientists at CERN, who poked a hole through into this uncultivated world and began to experiment within that acre. Eventually, they widened the entry point to enable others — mostly from universities — to join. They set up their own tiny plots within this acre, sowing seeds that they personally loved.

With time, the entrance widened even further, and geeks outside of universities found their way in. Then, home computing really began to take off, and the number of visitors expanded far beyond just the geeky hobbyists. Some people continued to cultivate their own little patches in the acre, but others opened community gardens: forum sites and shared blogs and chat rooms and webhosting services where people could develop their own projects. People brought in little gnome sculptures and garish lawn flamingos. Some people erected fencing to control who wandered in — or even who could see in — to their plots. But people had also begun to build pathways in the spaces among the patches: webrings and hand-curated blogrolls, vigorous hyperlinking, and early versions of search engines.

There were weeds, too. Invasive plants that threatened to crowd out what some people had lovingly built. Trolls that poisoned the forums and chat rooms, or the threat of viruses that made people more cautious. All too many people who shunned or harassed those who didn't fit the mold of the (white, male, straight) prototypical internet user.

And some from the outside world began to worry. What do you mean there are no police there? And you're letting kids in? Hey, those are my seeds you're using, and now you're just giving them away for free to other people!

But eventually, businesses set up shop, selling everything from seeds to tractors to garden gnomes to landscaping services to all the kinds of things people were used to using back outside of this digital expanse. And at first, they fit in among the hobbyist plots and community gardens.

But with time, businesses learned there were other ways to extract money from the community that had grown within this acre in the digital world. They set up tolls on the pathways. They planted invasive species that encroached on what other people had built, shading them out — or they spread pesticides that poisoned what others had cultivated. Some acquired plot after plot after plot, building their own empires through which others needed to pass to get where they were trying to go. Many businesses initially invited people in with open arms, promising that if they moved within their boundaries, the business would take care of all the hard stuff — the digging, the weeding, the sowing — and let you just do the parts you wanted to do. After a time, many people opted to do so, drawn in by these easy and free services that let them spend more time admiring the flowers or visiting neighbors and less time doing the dirty work. But then, the walls went up.

Towering over the rest of the acre, massive walls shaded out much of what was happening outside of these businesses' enclosures. People couldn't see over to know what was happening beyond, so was it even worth the effort to make a visit? After all, there's so much to see inside. These businesses set up right at the gate too, so some new entrants thought the space within the walls was all there was. They never saw the infinite expanse beyond, nor the creativity that was still flourishing out there.

Some pathways remained, mostly linking together these giant fortresses, but with time even those were made harder to pass. Rules were imposed to limit what plants you could grow and how you could grow them and who might ever be able to see them. Some maintained plots within multiple of these businesses' walled areas, but found themselves having to devote more and more of their time to maintaining all of their disparate gardens, or let some of them lie fallow.

The businesses developed systems to quickly usher people along from undesirable tenants, drawing their attention to the carefully manicured plots where nary a blade of grass was out of place. And they started checking IDs at the door, making sure you were known both to the business owners and the policemen who had set up watchtowers and CCTV networks. Increasingly, drones passed overhead, operated by businesses who peered in to see what kinds of plants you were growing and what kinds of decorations you were putting up in hopes of selling you something similar later on.

If a tenant decided they were sick of their spot within a walled garden, well, they could leave — but it meant they abandoned what they had built, and the path for friends or admirers of their work to come visit them became a lot more arduous to traverse.

This is the world of today's web. Most of us spend our days within the confines of a handful of platforms, wandering around to admire what people have done with the seeds they are allowed in the space they are allotted, with platform owners directing us to the gardens they think we might like — or, more often, the ones they think will keep us within their walls for longer. Occasionally we venture outside to another plot, but sometimes we're given dire warnings before we go. After all, there could be weeds out there!

And those who cultivate those plots outside of these walls face pressures to conform to the whims of the businesses in hopes that the pathways remain open. Otherwise, they might toil away in silence, rarely seeing visitors like they one day used to.

It feels grim, and especially so for those of us who remember the days before the walls. We miss the messy but innovative landscaping, the use of space beyond the tiny squares our landlords provide us, the mostly polite strangers who wandered through and remarked on our work or shared their knowledge with us.

But we often forget: that world is still out there.

The walled enclosures that crowded out much of that acre of developed land still reside within an infinite expanse of possibility. There are no limits to the web — if it has borders, they are ever expanding. We may feel as though we are trapped in a tiny, crowded, noisy space, but it is only because we don't see over the walls.

If we wanted, each of us could escape those walls and set up our own spaces within the limitless, fertile soil beyond. Some of us might opt to leave those walls permanently, while others might choose to split our time between our beautiful, messy, free world outside to maintain smaller, meticulously-groomed simulacrums within the enclosures that hint — without angering our landlords — at the creations beyond. We can periodically smuggle seeds and plant cuttings beyond the walls, ensuring that if the proprietors decide to evict us, our gardens will live on.

We can develop protocols — more resilient versions of those early footpaths — that inherently resist the tollbooths and border crossing gates established by the businesses with the walls. We can even develop our own community gardens with spaces for tenants that have their own models of governance far beyond the single benevolent platform dictatorship model — that inevitably grows less benevolent as money changes hands.

While some of the early gardens that we reminisce about didn't survive the shade of the large platforms or the dwindling flow of visitors that were rerouted within those walls, new gardens can be cultivated to their specifications. People can experiment with combining the things they loved about the old gardens with the tools and models of the ones that have grown since then, or return to the spirit of experimentation and try new things altogether. They can draw on the population explosion within the digital expanse to bring in new people with new ideas and new energy to revitalize what once was, and make it better than before.

Though we now face a new challenge as the dominance of the massive walled gardens has become overwhelming, we have tools in our arsenal: the memories of once was, and the creativity of far more people than ever before, who entered the digital expanse but have grown disillusioned with the business moguls controlling life within the walls.

And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was. In the early days, people had to fight to enter the expanse at all, and those who did were starting with little. Now, the expanse feels ubiquitous in some countries, and is becoming ever more accessible in the others. Sophisticated tools and techniques are available even to novices. Where once the walled gardens were the only viable option for novice gardeners or those without many resources, that is no longer so much the case — and the skills and resources required to establish one's own sovereign plot become more accessible by the day.

We can have a different web, if we want it.

Further reading

• “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again” by Anil Dash in Rolling Stone.
• “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden” by Maggie Appleton. Her beautiful illustrations are what I think of when I picture the digital expanse, and the feature image is inspired by her “avoid walled gardens” illustration in this post.
• “We Need To Rewild The Internet” by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon in Noema.
• The indie web, the cozy web, the small web
• The incredible variety of responses by people on Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky when I asked them what they miss about the “good old days” of the web

We're happy to announce the start of an experimental roadmapping effort dubbed Rust project goals. As described in RFC 3614, the plan is to establish a slate of project goals for the second half of 2024 (2024H2). We need your help! We are currently seeking ideas for project goals, particularly those that have motivated owners who have time and resources to drive the goal to completion. If you'd like to propose a goal, read more about the process here!

Goals aren’t everything, but they are our priorities

It's important to emphasize that goals are not an exhaustive list of everything we will do. Rather, they are the "big rocks", the top priority items that we most want to focus on and complete.

Goals represent a dual commitment

To be accepted, a goal needs an owner, the individual (or small set of individuals) who has agreed to do the work needed to move the goal to completion. The goal itself must then be accepted by one or more Rust teams, who are responsible for supporting that owner with reviews, feedback, and prompt decision-making.

Eventually, we expect project teams to offer a "menu" of available resources, such as reviewer bandwidth, or design/review meeting slots.

A project goal allows the owner to get advance approval that the relevant Rust teams care about the problem enough to commit resources (e.g. meeting time and review bandwidth), which in turn can allow the owner to commit resources (e.g. design and development time) towards solving the problem.

Goals describe problems, not solutions

Goals focus on the problem that we are planning to solve, not on the specific solution that we will use to solve it. When teams accept a goal, they are saying that the problem is important and they are willing to put in work helping the owner to solve it. Sometimes the owner will have a pretty clear idea how they want to proceed, but often they won't, and that's ok.

A solution sketch for a project goal might include experimentation to determine the right path for a solution, and any solution people have in mind might completely change as the goal progresses.

Owners shape the proposal, teams accept it

Being an owner is a key role, and one that we have not previously recognized in a formal way within Rust.

Being an owner is a commitment, but it’s also a privilege. The owner is expected to serve as the overall expert in the space. They will engage with stakeholders, and accept and coordinate input on the design.

In exchange for committing energy towards the goal, owners are entrusted with designing and proposing solutions. Ultimately, Rust Project teams will review those proposed solutions and approve or reject them, but the expectation is that teams will provide feedback or additional requirements, rather than taking over the design themselves.

Goal sizes

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Project goals will typically describe what the shiny future Rust will look like with the goal accomplished. However, humans are notoriously bad at planning and estimating, and in addition, resource commitments may be time-bounded and may require re-evaluation on a regular cadence.

Thus, project goals should focus primarily on a medium-term goal that can be accomplished within the year, and realistic milestones to be accomplished in that timeframe. Some project goals may be entirely completed within such a timeframe. Other project goals may set out incremental milestones (e.g. shipping an RFC), or even just experiments to determine feasibility.

Goals without owners

In order for a team to accept a goal and commit resources towards it, it needs an owner. However, in some cases project teams are aware of long-standing problems they'd like solutions to, but they don't have a specific owner identified who has committed to work on those problems.

As an experiment, we're also going to set out a few provisionally accepted "goals without owners", which teams have tentatively reviewed and said they'd like to commit to if an owner steps up. We're doing this both to give some examples of project goals, and to invite solutions to these long-standing problems. If this works out well, we'll likely formalize a clearer process for preapproving this kind of goal-in-need-of-owner.

If you want to draft a goal like this without an owner, please check with us and with the prospective project team.

Conversely, if you'd like to become the owner of one of these goals in need of owners, please get in touch with someone from the teams listed on the goal.

The goal selection process

In general, teams can accept a new project goal at any time, as long as they have the resources to commit to it. However, we'd also like to use project goals to form roadmaps. In addition, we want to make it as easy as possible for teams to evaluate what resources they're committing and whether all those commitments are compatible.

Thus, for this first experiment, we primarily aim to select a set of goals for the second half of 2024 (2024H2). In the future, we'll try to find the right balance between accepting new goals at any time and having a regular cycle of roadmaps and work.

Getting started

If you'd like to propose a goal, take a look at the documentation for proposing a goal.

If you'd like to become the owner of a goal in need of an owner, please get in touch with us.

If you'd like somewhere to discuss project goals, join us on Zulip.