Oh. By my own mistake, I had started writing this article showing my surprise that GNOME talk to us about Black Box again, among other things that sounded familiar to me. But no, what they published yesterday it was everything new that had happened in the week of July 15-22, and not the article from two weeks ago that I was looking at (thanks, Vivaldi RSS feature). Among what has happened in these seven days, the first thing the project mentions is that the GUADEC 2022 conference has taken place.
Later, in what interests most of us, they have announced in TWIG (remember, acronym for «This Week In GNOME») that they have released GNOME 43.alpha, which is the first preview version of the desktop to be used by Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu. Among its novelties, an Epiphany with support for extensions or a screenshot tool that now also allows you to annotate.
This week in GNOME
- GNOME 43.alpha is now available, with news such as:
- Improvements in GNOME Web, such as that it will support extensions, as well as the HTTP/2 protocol and will improve support for web applications.
- Nautilus will have an adaptive design, among other improvements.
- New API to recolor, with which developers can change the colors of their applications and have automatic updates of dependent colors. They will also be able to create presets that can be used, for example, to recolor a window based on the view's color scheme.
- Option to change the accent color, something that will not come as something new to Ubuntu 22.04 users because Canonical included it this April.
- New image viewer called Loupe, which will be responsive.
- Annotations in the screenshot tool.
- The tool for analyzing disk usage has been rewritten from Vala to Rust, and will have a new design.
- The calling app continues to improve the design, among other things.
- GNOME Web supports extensions, has improved download management, has improved reading mode and support for web applications, among others.
- Boxes (GNOME Boxes) now respects the color scheme, and has changed its development branch to "main".
- Boulder has switched to using GTK4.
- Calendar has added a sidebar to the main window and events are better viewed, among other interface improvements.
- The Settings app or Control Center has added a “Device Security” panel.
- Music has brought back support for random play.
- Foursquare, Facebook and Flickr are no longer available for online accounts.
- Software has improved notifications, interface and support for web applications, among others.
- Text Editor now uses libadwaita dialogs, supports opening local and remote STDIN streams, and text correction has been improved.
- The Weather app has polished its widget.
- Lots of news in/from libadwaita.
- Sysprof now uses GTK4.
- Many improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter.
- Parental controls now use GTK4 and libadwaita.
- Health 0.94.0 has arrived with many bug fixes and more reliable notifications.
- Commit has released a new version, with a theme changer, improved dark mode support, improved keyboard support, and a fix for the auto-caps option.
- New version of Workbench with fixes for crashes
and underlining of errors in Blueprint code using the Language Server Protocol. The "online" error messages are ready, but they won't be usable until GNOME 43 is released.
New stable version of the desktop on September 23
As for GNOME 43, which is probably the most interesting of these articles, the release of the stable version is scheduled for the day September 23, as we can read in this link (if we move through the calendar). The Release Candidate, which could also be called "Beta", will be released twenty days earlier, on September 3 to be more exact. The best way to try out all the new features is by using the GNOME OS pseudo-operating system, available at this link, in a virtual machine.