Right now I am very happy with my EmulationStation Desktop Edition on my old and battered laptop. From this frontend I can launch all my roms, including the DOOM ones and the ones that don't work well on RetroArch, and I have no complaints. But for GNOME (above all) there is Cartridges, an application that began by bringing together games from different stores (Steam, Lutris, Heroic...) and is now also compatible with RetroArch games. I haven't had the time or desire to learn how to make it work with these roms, and that's why I have a thorn in my side.
And one of the most notable news this week in GNOME is that cartridges it's going more and more. Although the truth is that the latest development only seems to work for GNOME, it is such an interesting project that it soon entered its circle. But many more things have happened from October 6 to 13, and here is the list with all the news This week.
This week in GNOME
- gnome-software already has the branch for 46, and several interface improvements have arrived that have been added to the queue after 45.
- video trimmer 0.8.2 has arrived as a minor update with visual improvements based on GNOME 45.
- Cartridges 2.6 has arrived with the ability to search our game library from the desktop. To achieve this you have to go to Settings/Search and activate Cartridges. At the moment only in GNOME.
- Meld is migrating to GTK4 and libadwaita:
- MainWindow uses Adw.ApplicationWindow.
- The NewDiff page and the FileDiff and DirDiff pages have also been (mostly) migrated.
- The Preferences dialog uses Adw.PreferencesDialog.
- Most signals have been migrated to event handlers.
- Most methods have been migrated to new signatures (eg do_snapshot, do_size_allocate, etc.)
- There are still things to achieve (help is welcome):
- Dialog execution is now asynchronous (save file, etc.) and has to be rewritten.
- Gdk.WindowAttr is gone (is it needed anymore?).
- Gtk.RecentChooser has disappeared, is there a replacement?
- MeldSourceMap do_snapshot_layer is not called, although the new syntax is used.
- DiffGrid's do_size_allocate is not called, even though the new syntax is being used (which currently prevents the color overlay from being drawn on the HandleWindow).
- Dosage is a medication tracking app, and it's now available on Flathub. Among its functions, inventory tracking, history, notifications and frequency modes. Out of mere curiosity, I went to their GitHub page to see if it is compatible with mobile devices and it doesn't say anything about it. Although desktop applications are useful, I think one like this should reach our pockets.
- Wildcard 0.3.0 is now available and has arrived on Flathub. It's an update that brings a new benchmark panel to quickly test common regular patterns.
- Gir.Core, a project that aims to provide C# bindings for different GObjects-based libraries, released v0.5.0-preview.2 this week. It is a release to prepare for 0.5.0 and includes some API cleanups, bug fixes, and has added more asynchronous APIs.
- Fretboard has received several improvements:
- Support for left and right handed guitars.
- Independence from the direction of the text for the chord diagram, solving the mirroring problem I had with right-to-left languages.
- Turkish translations, Spanish, Norwegian, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, making Fretboard available in a total of 9 languages.
- The Weather Or Not extension has been updated to fix an old bug from Gnome users 42-44 where the indicator would appear twice. A new version has also been released, ingesting changes to the backend from the upstream (Weather O'Clock extension) and refactoring the code to work with Gnome Shell 45. For the next version, an options backend is being worked on that allows change the location of the weather indicator on the panel.
And this has been all this week in GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.