About

I’m Robert Ancell, a software engineer based in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I’ve been working in open source for more than 20 years, across most of the stack, from low-level system components up through desktop applications. Much of that time was spent in the GNOME project, where I’m the original author of LightDM (the display manager used by several Linux distributions) and Simple Scan (GNOME’s scanning application).

I work at Canonical, primarily on Ubuntu and on Flutter. Canonical’s Linux desktop applications are increasingly built with Flutter, and a good chunk of my time goes into that: improving Flutter on Linux, contributing upstream, and figuring out what a solid desktop development story looks like for a framework that grew up mobile-first.

This blog is where I record my thoughts on open source software development: the problems I run into, the decisions behind them, and what I learn along the way. Expect notes on:

• Flutter, particularly the Linux desktop side
• Ubuntu and the wider Linux desktop ecosystem
• Open source process and tooling
• Whatever else is directly in front of me at the time

My old blog, Bob the Gnome, is still up for historical reference. Most of my projects live on GitHub, and I’m also on LinkedIn.