Parameters

Adwaita Nothing is an experiment to use only apps linking libadwaita for primary workflow needs. Notably, this means no GTK+3, Qt, Electron, or terminal applications outside of “glue logic” - helper programs that can be leveraged by libadwaita workflows.

The experiment is conducted on Fedora Silverblue 44 beta, until it matures.

Observations

The breadth of Adwaita apps available for GNOME have lessened my reliance on the web browser. For example, instead of going to mastodon.social, I open Tuba. Instead of going to Claude.ai, I open Alpaca, leveraging LiteLLM. Instead of browsing Tidal, I open Tonearm. I liken this to an alternate timeline where network-enabled native applications won over web apps. This is, in essence, everything I’ve wanted for years now.

As an example, I’ve complained for the past decade that, even though my SSD is a thousand times larger than my hard drive was in the 90s, I could have an offline dictionary in the 90s - but not now. Wordbook resolves that. On the app’s first run, it downloads a dictionary for offline use.

There’s even an app for offline development documentation: Biblioteca.

The promise of the original internet was to be a network of autonomous nodes. And as that vision mutated into a horde of helpless cloud clients, the hauntology of desktop-first computing grew louder. I am very pleased to find that the GNOME ecosystem in 2026 is bringing this model back to life.

Biggest Gap

You’d expect email to be the first thing implemented on a new or refreshed platform. However, there doesn’t seem to be a stable Adwaita email client. Envelope has been in development since October 2023, however as of March 20th 2026 the most recent commit was five months ago. Under my experimental constraints, this requires me to check email elsewhere.

The Waiting Game

Much of what I’d normally do in a terminal happens in GNOME Builder now. For example when writing this blog, my workflow would naturally be

hugo new content content/posts/2026/03/title.md
vi content/posts/2026/03/title.md
hugo server -D

This can be wrapped in a Flatpak manifest:

"command": "hugo serve -D",
    ...
      "sources": [
        {
          "type": "archive",
          "strip-components": 0,
          "url": "https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.158.0/hugo_extended_0.158.0_Linux-64bit.tar.gz",
          "sha256": "c2a724ac3c8e949fca56dd438b868b2128837754420c20a6e7ae345616c4e625"
        }
    ]
    ...
      "name": "site",
      "buildsystem": "simple",
      "build-commands": [
        "/app/bin/hugo"
      ],

Doing so allows the site to be built with a simple click of the run button in GNOME Builder. Except that function is currently broken on this system.

The installed version of Flatpak is 1.17.2. Attempting to run any project in GNOME Builder with that version produces the following error: bwrap: Can't bind mount /oldroot/var/home/user/.cache/font-dirs.xml on /newroot/run/host/font-dirs.xml: Unable to mount source on destination: No such file or directory.

This issue is resolved in Flatpak 1.17.3, which released on March 15th. It’s only been 5 days, but the wait is certainly uncomfortable.

In the meantime I can work around this by aliasing the fetched hugo and using it in Builder’s CLI interface. For applications I want to build, I need to export a flatpak and install it it locally to test, which is certainly not ideal.

Boxes

As the public release of Boxes is GTK+3, it’s not permissible under this experiment, however Boxes’ lead developer has been working on an Adwaita rewrite of Boxes in this repo. It too hasn’t seen activity in 5 months, however this aligns with the general push towards GNOME 50 development, so activity may pick up again. Unlike Envelope, though, it’s actually usable. I am able to deploy CentOS Stream 10 inside it, though GNOME OS was unable to accept keyboard input.

What worries me about this rewrite, however, is that it relies on libmks, which hasn’t seen a commit since January 2024 (as of March 2026). I’m hopeful, however, that further development of the Boxes rewrite could stimulate development in libmks.

Unexpected Results

Hopefully by the past two sections, it should be clear that this experiment has got me really interested in GNOME development. While I’m in no position to contribute today, I’ve got a copy of both The Rust Programming Language, 3e and Effective C, 2e. And recent changes in my life have allowed me to make serious progress in reading both of those and The Book of Kubernetes.

If this rabbit hole leads where it seems, this whimsical experiment may stir slumbering ambitions. Regardless, only good things can come of this.