What a milestone! We’re thrilled to celebrate the 200th post of This Week in GNOME - that’s nearly four years of showcasing the amazing work, features, and people that make GNOME thrive.
200 weeks of curated updates
2.051 individual news entries
1.527 images showcasing the latest features
259 people who are part of the TWIG community
From new features, fresh designs, bug fixes but also exciting app launches — TWIG has become a vital pulse of the GNOME community.
Whether you’re a reader, contributor, or part of the community behind the scenes — thank you for being a part of this journey! ❤️
Launching TWIG 2.0
Nearly four years after its launch, I’m delighted to unveil a completely revamped thisweek.gnome.org! Welcome to TWIG 2.0 — featuring a modern technical foundation, a refreshed design, exciting new features, and so much more!
Modernized design, now in line with the fabulous gnome.org redesign
New dedicated landing page showing the latest numbers
Beautiful autogenerated cover images for each post
Showcasing a featured project from the week
Include a screenshot in your update — with a bit of luck, it’ll appear on the post’s cover!
Each screenshot is dynamically decorated with the latest Adwaita wallpaper
Revamped posts page, feel nostalgic when you scroll through 200 weeks of GNOME history
New post filter make it easy to find updates on specific projects
Click on a contributor name to see their past TWIG submissions
Click-and-hold images in posts to view them in full size
Extended Open Graph protocol support, so posts look great when shared on social media
Improved RSS/Atom feed with richer metadata and better formatting
Rebuilt with Astro, offering a faster and more modern experience
…and many more improvements!
Have fun with TWIG 2.0, I’m looking forward to your feedback!
And now, as usual, to the happenings across the GNOME Project in the week from 09 May to 16 May 😉.
Today (May 15th) is the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. To celebrate it, I wrote about the unsung heroes that keep on fighting against all adverse conditions around the Linux desktop in order to improve its accessibility. You can read more here.
Mutter, GNOME’s compositor framework that GNOME Shell is built on top of, got a new developer tool this week, the “Mutter Development Kit”. This new development kit provides a new way to run a nested GNOME Shell instance inside a GTK app which will provide various tools useful for compositor and shell development. The tool it has so far is touch emulation, but more will come.
Binary 5.3 has just been released as a small update. It comes with many translation updates and a few small updates.
Development hasn’t been too active lately due to uni work and personal issues. I’m hoping to work on it a lot more over the summer and hopefully past that. In the mean time, get it now on flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.fizzyizzy05.binary
Newsflash 4.0 enters beta which can be checked out in the flathub beta channel. In this release most of the UI code has been refactored to make use of all the Gtk & rust binding goodies that were added over the years.
Image, Audio and Video attachments are now all featured more prominently.
More can be read here: https://blogs.gnome.org/jangernert/2025/05/12/newsflash-4-0-beta/
Really happy to announce release of version 0.1.3 of Cube Timer🥳. Cube Timer is a tool to time your Rubik’s Cube solves. It tracks your solve time and maintains averages of previous solves. Solves can be organized into different practice sessions as well. It also has a basic scramble generator. The design of Cube Timer was inspired by cstimer.net.
Nautilus Compare, the context menu diff extension for Nautilus file manager (aka GNOME Files) is back in Debian repositories after five year hiatus. Although updated for Python 3 and GTK 3 already in 2020, the extension using Meld diff and merge tool by default and with localisations for 14 languages was only uploaded and approved about a week ago after months of intensified user demand and with support for latest GTK 4 and Nautilus 43. Extension is still available for earlier releases of Debian family distros in the Launchpad PPA, but can be conveniently installed from default repositories in current development and anticipated official releases.
Due to a pesky bug that makes Fractal crash when our users attempt to start a verification, we are releasing Fractal 11.1 only 2 weeks after Fractal 11. And while we’re at it we also backported a few fixes for smaller paper cuts!
If you want to help us avoid regressions like that in the future, you could use Fractal Nightly. You could even get rid of our remaining bugs yourself!
Flatpak 1.16.1 is out! It’s the first bugfix release of the 1.16 series. Some highlights of this release:
Apps with the dri permission can now access /dev/udmabuf too. This may allow for better memory sharing and performance improvements in apps
Don’t propagate the Wayland socket from host into sandbox if access to the Wayland socket has been denied
Flatpak now looks for TLS certificates at /etc/containers/certs.d when interacting with OCI registries
Fix intermittent flatpak-portal crashes by avoiding unnecessary multi-threading. This should help apps and libraries that heavily use the Flatpak portal, such as WebKit and glycin.
When using parental controls, allow a child account to update existing apps by default, to ensure that security and bugfix updates can be installed
Make systemd scopes easier to match to Flatpak app instances
A couple of performance improvements in some specific situations
