As part of our infrastructure initiative funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund, a number of community members have been hard at work for the past weeks. Starting now we will send a weekly update of our progress on thisweek.gnome.org.
Some highlights of our progress so far:
Home Encryption
Adrian Vovk added support for systemd homed in AccountService. This is the first step towards safer encryption and a nicer user experience.
Sam Hewitt is working with Adrian on the designs and task definitions for home encryption.
XDG Desktop Portal
Georges Stavracas and Hubert Figuière are improving existing portals, doing various maintenance tasks on the project, and introducing some exciting new portal APIs, such as the USB portal. Things that have already landed include:
Drag and drop of folders will now work with sandboxed applications (Drop a folder from Nautilus onto Amberol)
Some bug fixes in the document portal, notably the one preventing ejection of USB flash drives (thanks Alex) and the one preventing using sqlite3 databases
Ivan Molodetskikh is improving the GNOME Shell/Mutter profiling instrumentation and adding integration for the Tracy profiler. As part of this, he had already discovered several actionable performance bugs. Thanks to Mutter maintainers, some of those have fixes pending or merged.
Notifications
Julian Sparber and Jonas Dreßler are working on improving notifications, both in terms of platform APIs and user interface. As part of this Julian is implementing grouping notifications by app in GNOME Shell.
Sam Hewitt has fixed some accessibility issues in the GNOME Shell stylesheet. Joanie Diggs is reducing technical debt in the Orca screen reader, improving documenation, and rewriting table and table cell support.
Hardware Support
Jonas Dreßler is working on hardware-accelerated screencasts and improvements to the Linux Bluetooth stack.
Emmanuel Gil Peyrot (Link Mauve) is adding support for GL_KHR_robustness in Mutter. It allows the session to recover from a GPU driver crash. This is a requirement to unlock newer graphical features that aren’t well tested yet with GPU drivers.
Maps is now showing the “mode of transportation” icon instead of the generic filled circle start icon in the turn instruction list for turn-by-turn navigation as an extra detail and to act as a reminder as to what kind of routing it is showing
Alexander Slobodeniuk has added a new g_log_writer_default_set_debug_domains() function in GLib which allows enabled debug logging domains to be changed at runtime without modifying G_MESSAGES_DEBUG in the environment (which can never be threadsafe)
The second app to enter Circle this week is Decibels. Decibels lets you play audio files in a beautiful, convenient, and intuitive way. Congratulations!
Biblioteca now supports tabs! Middle-clicking on the sidebar or documentation links now opens them in new tabs. It also received some other improvements and bug fixes such as
Fixed an issue where shortcuts window prevents app from closing
Fixed an issue where main window CSS leaks into other windows
Shows a status page in sidebar when no results found
Fixed layout with “Large Text” accessibility option
This week Girens version 2.0.3 is released. This is a small update. In this version the old sidebar is replaced for an overlay sidebar. This will make the appearance of the application more inline with other Gnome applications.
We just released Fractal 5! It is a full rewrite compared to Fractal 4, that now leverages GTK 4, libadwaita, and the Matrix Rust SDK. The two-and-a-half-year effort brings a new interface that fits all screens, big 🖥️ or small 📱, but should still look familiar to users of earlier versions.
It still offers the same old features you know and love, with a few additions. Highlights (italics is new✨ in 5):
Find rooms to discuss your favorite topics, or talk privately to people, securely thanks to end-to-end encryption
Send rich formatted messages, files, or your current location
Reply to specific messages, react with emoji, edit or remove messages
View images, and play audio and video directly in the conversation
See who has read messages, and who is typing
Log into multiple accounts at once (with Single-Sign On support)
For our next version, we intend to add missing key features, like notification settings, room settings and moderation… We also plan on improving the accessibility and polish the rough edges. Any help is greatly appreciated!
