Red Hat employee wanted to leave US. Company said no. Now key GNOME components are unmaintained

2 May, 2026 - Categories: Linux - Tags: GNOME, Ptyxis, GNOME Text Editor, Red Hat

By Steven Rosenberg

The Red Hat employee who created some of the software that is critical to the GNOME desktop environment wanted to leave the U.S. and move to France. The company said no. He quit and moved anyway.

Christian Hergert announced in February 2026 that due to his family situation and the current government, he wanted to leave the U.S. for France.

He's worried about his family during President Trump's crackdown on immigration, legal, illegal and otherwise. And he wanted to leave the country because of it.

He asked Red Hat to allow him to transfer to France. The company declined.

Christian's work is a huge part of the GNOME desktop. Most GNOME-based distributions have moved to the Ptyxis terminal and GNOME Text Editor, two apps he developed and maintained.

Nearly three months later, nobody apparently has taken on the maintenance, let alone the development of these critical apps.

A lot of people maintain apps or packages as part of their day job and somehow continue doing so after they leave the company's employ. I don't expect that from Christian, or anybody.

Ptyxis helped make it easy to use containers created with Distrobox, Toolbox and other technologies. I'd definitely call this terminal app critical in the age of immutable/atomic distros.

GNOME Text Editor is a great app. Along with Ptyxis, I use it daily. The Text Editor isn't packed with features, but it runs great and looks great: It's built with GTK4.

The former default text editor, GEdit, is also excellent, and it has additional (yet poorly documented) features that hadn't yet come to the newer Text Editor. That's OK. GEdit was never updated to GTK4, maybe because GNOME Text Editor appeared to "succeed it" in the default of most GNOME distros.

So whether or not the GNOME Text Editor and Ptyxis have maintainers, they are still being maintained. Even GEdit has a new release for GNOME 50.

Is this a tempest in a teacup, or a real concern?