It's the weekend again, when the two projects that develop the two most popular Linux desktops in the world talk to us about everything they've just launched or is about to arrive. The first, on Fridays, is usually GNOME, the graphical environment used by the main versions of distros such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora. But GNOME is not just a desktop, but also applications developed by the same project, its circle or programmers who create software with them in mind.
Among the novelties of this week, I would highlight two. One is GStreamer 1.22, and the other is related to Phosh, the interface based on GNOME which, with the permission of the one that is developing the official project, is the GNOME for mobile phones par excellence. What you have next is what has happened in the week that has gone from January 20 to 27 of this 2023.
This week in GNOME
About Phosh, they say:
The Phosh test suite may already be known to run the phone shell in different locales. In doing so, it takes screenshots so we can ensure translations fit within the size limitations of mobile devices and designers have an easy way to validate any changes they make. New this week is that we've doubled the number of screenshots, now covering most of the modal dialogs. This is what it looks like in Ukrainian (untranslated strings are from our own tests so we don't bother the translators with):
- GStreamer 1.22 I arrive Monday 23 with:
- New gtk4paintablesink and gtkwaylandsink renderers.
- Improved support for the AV1 video codec.
- New adaptive streaming clients HLS, DASH and Microsoft Smooth Streaming.
- Qt6 support for rendering video within a QML scene.
- Minimal builds optimized for binary size, including only the individual elements needed.
- Improvements and stabilization of Playbin3, Decodebin3, UriDecodebin3 and Parsebin.
- Compatibility with WebRTC simulcast and with Google Congestion Control.
- Support for ingest/playout of WebRTC-based media servers (WHIP/WHEP).
- New easy to use WebRTC sender plugin with batteries included.
- Simple reconstruction of the RTP sender timestamp for RTP and RTSP.
- ONVIF timed metadata support.
- New fragmented MP4 muxer and non-fragmented MP4 muxer.
- New plugins for Amazon AWS audio transcription and storage services.
- New videocolorscale element that you can convert and scale in one go to improve performance.
- High bit depth video improvements.
- Support for touch screen events in the Navigation API.
- H.264/H.265 timestamp correction elements for PTS/DTS reconstruction before muxers.
- Improved DMA buffer sharing design and modifier handling for hardware accelerated video decoders/encoders/filters and capture/rendering on Linux.
- Improvements to the Video4Linux2 hardware accelerated decoder.
- CUDA integration and plugin improvements.
- New H.264 / AVC, H.265 / HEVC and AV1 hardware accelerated video encoders for AMD GPUs using the Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK.
- New “force-live” property for audiomixer, composer, glvideomixer, d3d11compositor, etc.
- Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.
- GNOME Crosswords 0.3.7 has arrived with:
- Custom game widget for responsive layout, animation support.
- New puzzle type supported: Crosswords.
- Supports puzzles with zero or one column of clues, such as alphabetic crosswords.
- New options for the preferences dialog:
- Preference: Hide puzzle sets by default and let the user select the ones they want.
- Preference: Hide puzzles once solved.
- Add tags to puzzles to provide more information to users.
- Add unsolved puzzle count.
- Fix zooming of all game interface elements.
- Support for horizontal and vertical cell dividers.
- On-screen keyboard fix.
- Removed GLib's slice allocator, which will now use g_malloc() and g_free() internally.
And that's been it for this week at GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.