During this week, GNOME has received a donation of 1 million euros. In the articles about what has happened during the last seven days, we usually talk about new applications, updates and, in short, software that advances, but there are also cases in which we have to talk about the project in general and this donation will help improve the desktop and part of what is related to it. The generous company has been Sovereign Tech Fund.
This happened in the week from November 3 to 10, during which time applications such as Tagger, Fractal or Impression were updated. But without a doubt, the highlight has been this donation from Sovereign Tech Fund, and with that we open the News list that they provided us a few hours ago.
This week in GNOME
- Sovereign Tech Fund has donated €1M to GNOME, and the money will be used until the end of 2024 to:
- Improve the current state of accessibility.
- Design and prototype a new accessibility stack.
- Individually encrypt users' home directories.
- Modernize secret storage.
- Increase the range and quality of hardware support.
- Invest in quality assurance and developer experience.
- Expand and extend Freedesktop APIs.
- Consolidation and improvement of platform components.
- Specifically, GNOME says to expect news in libsecret, oo7, Seahorse, systemd, Linux, Atspi, Orca, WebKitGTK, Shell, Mutter, Flatpak, AccountService, Settings, gdm, initial setup, Gtk, GLib, online accounts and languages. The team in charge of all this has been named "GNOME STF", started working on October 2 and has already achieved certain things.
- Impression v3 has arrived with the possibility of downloading the distribution that we want to burn from the Internet.
- The gtk-rs workbook has been updated to use the asynchronous dialog API from libadwaita 1.3 and replace Leaflet with NavigationSplitView from libadwaita 1.4.
- This week Notify arrived, a native client for ntfy.sh that will help you receive notifications about DIY projects.
- Kana has arrived at Flathub. It is an app that allows you to practice Hiragana and Katakana recognition. All characters include audio files so we can know what they sound like, and the app icon has been changed.
- Tagger v2023.11.2 arrived with many fixes and improvements, such as:
- Added the ability to specify ""/"" in a tag-to-file name format string to move files to a new directory when renaming files.
- Tagger can now repair damaged files from within the application itself.
- Tagger will now show files with damaged covers as damaged files.
- Fixed an issue where specifying the directory separator in the Label to filename option.
- Limit file name characters enabled, no new directories were created.
- Fixed an issue that prevented some custom properties from being removed from vorbis and wav files.
- Updated translations.
- Fractal 5.rc1 is the first RC since Fractal was rewritten to take advantage of the benefits of GTK4 and the Matrix Rust SDK, and among its changes we have:
- A stunning new look thanks to libadwaita 1.4.
- Tracking read receipts has been greatly improved thanks to the work done in the Matrix Rust SDK.
- The same upstream work allows for much better tracking of activity in the room list.
- Complete lists of read messages and reactions to messages can be viewed in popovers.
- Destructive actions like deleting a message or leaving a room now ask for confirmation.
- The most notable performance issues and memory leaks have been fixed so that Fractal runs as smoothly as ever.
- Footage has received visual tweaks with v.1.3.0. It is a version that brings multiple fixes for various bugs and unexpected closures (crashes). It also updates its runtime to use that of GNOME 45. Footage is an application for making simple edits to videos, such as cropping, rotating or trimming, and is available in Flatub.
And that's been it for this week at GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.