Lots of discussion on Planet Gnome about self-signed certificates and SSL and so on. I wonder if the Linux distros should get together and create a new CA, and then install that CA’s root certificate in browsers? So that way, things like various project bugzillas will have a legit SSL certificate without having to pay if they don’t want to. Of course, this new FreeSoftwareProjectCA would still have to go through the same verification processes to ensure that a given certificate is being asked for by the right people, etc, etc.

In the New World Order, Linux apps should all store their user-specific data according to the FreeDesktop Base Directory specification, which in practice means that config details for myapp end up in $HOME/.config/myapp. All well and good. However, I don’t like having configuration stored in dotfiles; I like to be able to get at it more easily, so I want it in $HOME/Settings. The XDG spec provides for this: you set an environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME (which defaults to $HOME/.config) and then everything uses it. Great! But…where do I set this variable so that all the apps get it?

Some suggestions: