GNOME has published a new note about the new features they have introduced in the last seven days, the period of time that went from January 19 to 26. Seeing how they started it, it seems clear that they are making good use of the Sovereign Tech Fund donation, since there are many points in their corresponding section. There is a bit of everything between them, and they are separated into components such as accessibility, platform, hardware support and security.
This only adds up. On the other hand, there are also third-party developers who continue working at their own pace, although this week there are only two points that are not from GNOME or its direct circle. What you have below is the list with this week's news.
This week in GNOME
- With the STF donation:
- Improved accessibility:
- Added a system information presenter in Orca.
- Completed code cleanup and removal of pyatspi dependency for hypertext and hyperlink interfaces.
- Work has begun on creating cleanup AT-SPI2 utility code for the functionality issue related to Orca's accessible text.
- It has been proposed to facilitate text selection via ATK/AT-SPI2 across multiple objects at once (similar to what IAccessible2 created).
- Proposal to have an attribute change signal for object attributes.
- We have started converting Orca's WebKitGtk support to the generic web support currently shared by Chromium and Gecko.
- Promoted a partial extension of the Wayland protocol for accessibility consumers (screen readers and the like).
- The accessibility extension has begun to be implemented as a proof of concept in Mutter.
- We have investigated where TreeViews are still used and an initiative has been started to port to more accessible widgets (e.g. ListView, ColumnView).
- Other accessibility improvements.
- Platform:
- Fixed a bug in flatpak-builder rename-appdata-file.
- Avatar libadwaita is now used in gnome-initial-setup.
- They are working on expanding the XDG portal notification API with portal issue sounds and images.
- It has started with a proof of concept for a GTK linter.
- Other improvements to the platform.
- Hardware support:
- We have continued to iterate on the VRR configuration UX in Settings.
- Several VRR related issues have been investigated and resolved
- Other improvements in hardware support.
- Safety:
- The work of implementing secret server/backend in oo7 has continued.
- The use of systemd user-encrypted credentials is being investigated and coordinated.
- Improved accessibility:
AdwDialoghas landed, along withAdwAlertDialog,AdwPreferencesDialogyAdwAboutDialog. There is also a migration guide for all the new widgets. The old widgets are not deprecated yet, but they will be in GNOME 47.- The GTK 4.13.6 version released this week changes the default renderer to ngl. The intent of this change is to expand testing and verify that the new renderers are ready for production. If significant issues appear, it may be rolled back to stable version 4.14 in March. You can still override the choice of the renderer using the GSK_RENDERER environment variable. Since ngl can handle fractional scaling much better than the old gl renderer, fractional scaling is now enabled by default with gl. If you are still using the old gl renderer (for example, because the system is limited to GLES2), fractional scaling can be disabled by setting the GDK_DEBUG environment variable to include the key gl-no-fractional.
- Maps now shows an empty state for the favorites menu, and also allows you to delete favorites directly from the popover (with an undo option). GeoJSON shapelayer rendering has also been improved, showing descriptions for the marked locations and also the layer name in the bubbles.
- Fragments now allows you to search for added torrents.
- oo7 has received a rewrite of the secret-tool, an application to interact with the keyring, and another of secret portal. Additionally, a server-side implementation has been in the works.
And that's been it for this week at GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.