GNOME begins to improve aspects related to security with the million from Sovereign Tech

Two weeks ago, GNOME Project reported that he had received a donation of 1 million Euros from Sovereign Tech, and also about what they were going to do with it initially. And he is fulfilling what he promised. This week, GNOME has published the usual article about the news that has taken place in the last week, and in the week from November 17 to 24, the first results have begun to be seen.

And it has not been little. Little time has passed since the donation, about 15 days, and in that time they have improved in sections such as Home Encryption, XDG Desktop Portal, hardware support, accessibility... Anyone would think that they have been working with it for months. Sovereign Tech money, but I also think it's something they had to do, show that the investment is worth it.

This week in GNOME

• With the money from Sovereigh Tech's donation they have done all this:
  • In Home Encryption:
    • Added support for systemd homed in AccountService. This is the first step towards more secure encryption and a more pleasant user experience.
    • They are working on designs and task definitions for Home Encryption.
  • XDG Desktop Portal:
    • Folder drag and drop now works with standalone applications.
    • Correction of some errors in the document portal, in particular the one that prevented the ejection of USB drives and the one that prevented the use of sqlite3 databases.
    • Expanded website and developer documentation
    • The new USB portal can now create and monitor applications using USB devices through portal, and has a permission to control which apps are allowed to use portal.
  • GLib has received maintenance.
  • Secret Management has seen the PAM module ported from gnome-keyring to libsecret. It is the first step to replace gnome-keyring with oo7.
  • CSS variable support is being added to GTK.

• • They are improving the GNOME Shell/Mutter profiling instrumentation and adding integration for the Tracy profiler.
  • They are working on improving notifications, both in terms of platform APIs and user interface.
  • They are also improving online accounts, including support for CalDAV/CardDAV, port to GTK4, and replacing the embedded web view in favor of using the preferred browser for OAuth2. We are also discussing more general improvements to the GOA architecture.
  • Fixed some accessibility issues in the GNOME Shell style sheet. They are reducing technical debt on the Orca screen reader, improving documentation, and rewriting support for tables and table cells.
  • Work is underway on hardware-accelerated screencasts and improvements to the Linux Bluetooth stack. They are adding support for GL_KHR_robustness in Mutter. Allows the session to recover from a GPU driver failure. This is a requirement to unlock new graphics features that are not yet well tested with GPU drivers.

What follows are the new features, that is, the usual ones that are not driven by any donation.

• Maps now displays the “transportation mode” icon instead of the generic filled circle start icon in the turn instructions list for turn-by-turn navigation, as an added detail and to remember what type of route it is displaying.

• New feature added g_log_writer_default_set_debug_domains() to Glib allowing to change enabled debug logging domains at runtime without modifying G_MESSAGES_DEBUG in the environment.
• Switcheroo has become part of the GNOME circle. It allows you to convert images to different types and change their size.
• He has also entered the circle Decibels, which allows you to play audio in a visual, convenient and intuitive way.
• Solanum 5.0.0 has arrived with:
  • The possibility of consulting the notes of the latest version has been added.
  • Switch to a new audio player.
  • Fixed notification buttons.
  • Various translation updates.
• Dialect 2.2.0 has introduced several improvements and bug fixes, most notably that you can now use Lingva's text-to-speech option in addition to Google's.
• Library 1.2 now supports tabs, plus:
  • Fixed an issue where the shortcuts window prevented the app from closing.
  • Fixed an issue where CSS from the main window was leaking to other windows.
  • Displays a status page in the sidebar when no results are found.
  • Layout fix with “Large Text” accessibility option.

• Girens 2.0.3 (Plex client) is a small update that replaces the old sidebar with a layered bar.

• Fractal 5 is now available, and is a complete rewrite compared to Fractal 4. Among other things, it now uses GTK4, libadwaita, and the Matrix Rust SDK. It has also introduced new features such as end-to-end encryption, the ability to respond or react with emojis to messages and edit messages, the ability to see who has read messages and the ability to use multiple accounts.

• Extension Manager 0.4.3:
  • Search has been updated to be fully compatible with the latest version of extensions.gnome.org.
  • Fixed a long-standing issue where successful search results were being overwritten by a previous query.
  • Fixed an issue where the global extensions switch would get 'stuck'.
  • Use the new libadwaita and GNOME 45 widgets.

And that, which has not been little, has been everything this week in GNOME.

Images and content: TWIG.