Tux Machines

Outreachy in GNOME and Rewriting Cartridges (GNOME)

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 12, 2025

GNOME ☛ Asman Malika: My Outreachy Journey: From curiosity to contribution

Hello! I’m Asman Malika, and I still can’t quite believe I’m writing this as an Outreachy intern.I’m working on the GNOME project: Improving document signing in GNOME Document Viewer (Papers), focusing on adding both manual and digital signing features, and improving the user interface, through a smoother signing experience.

Laura Kramolis: Rewriting Cartridges

Gamepad support, collections, instant imports, and more!

Cartridges is, in my biased opinion, the best game launcher out there. To use it, you do not need to wait 2 minutes for a memory-hungry Electron app to start up before you can start looking for what you want to play. You don’t need to sign into anything. You don’t need to spend 20 minutes configuring it. You don’t need to sacrifice your app menu, filling it with low-resolution icons designed for backdoored Windows that don’t disappear after you uninstall a game. You install the app, click “Import”, and all your games from anywhere on your computer magically appear.

It was also the first app I ever wrote. From this, you can probably already guess that it is an unmaintainable mess. It’s both under- and over-engineered, it is full of bad practices, and most importantly, I don’t trust it. I’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve learned so much that if I were to write the app again, I would approach it completely differently. Since Cartridges is the preferred way to launch games for so many other people as well, I feel it is my duty as a maintainer to give it my best shot and do just that: rewrite the app from scratch.