Last week the FOSDE 2024 was held, and both GNOME like other projects passed through there. There were also other dates marked on the calendar, and Article Last week's news report was a little shorter than expected. The section on developments made with the Sovereign Tech Fund donation was especially missed, but that's okay, here is the list with what happened from February 2 to 9 and much of it is left in this section.
Some GNOME members are taking advantage of the STF donation to work on infrastructure-related projects. Felix confirms that they did not publish any of this last week by the FOSDEM in Brussels, so the first of the following News list It is a fairly long combined point that includes what has been done thanks to the donation in the last two weeks.
This week in GNOME
- With STF donation money:
- Updated the work of GNOME online accounts by adding basic filtering of system calls to glycin bwrap sandboxes using a seccomp permission list.
- Implemented high contrast hint portal adjustment in xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, libadwaita and libhandy.
- Lots of tweaks to the GNOME Shell and High Contrast stylesheet and a new design for the variable refresh rate (VRR) settings. The composer side of Newton has also been implemented, the new a11y architecture prototype.
- Various improvements to Mutter related to VVR.
- Updated VVR work and is now ready for review.
- Experimentation has continued to achieve smooth cursor updates with the KMS thread.
- Work has continued on the integration of systemd-homed.
- Other news, available in the TWIG note (link at the end of the article).
- Added support for
--versiona GApplication. You can call withg_application_set_version(). - Secrets has received numerous updates during this season of development. First, the architecture has been redesigned to support different key providers in addition to simple key files. Based on this work it has added support for YubiKey and PKCS11 (Smartcard). Additionally, the user interface has been revamped to make use of libadwaita's navigation split view widgets. Finally, a quick copy action was added to input rows.
- Errands has a new version that includes new functions and corrections:
- Drag and drop tasks between lists.
- Markdown syntax highlighting in assignment notes.
- Progress bars for each task.
- Reduced sync requests for faster sync.
- Improved management of edits with synchronization enabled.
- Improved translations.
- Graphs is part of the GNOME circle, so it has benefited from infrastructure improvements. The code base has been moved to the GNOME GitLab, and translations are done with the project's translation platform. In addition, the application has received these new features:
- The size of labels and titles in style sheets can now be adjusted in finer increments.
- Hidden curves are no longer used when automatically setting canvas boundaries.
- The subtitle in the main app now shows the file location without the file name, which is already shown above.
- Some minor tweaks under the hood, which should result in slightly faster boot times (around 0,3s on my setup).
- Updated some strings, and metadata to reflect the change to GNOME GitLab.
- Aviator 0.5.1 has arrived, especially with improvements in SVT-AV1-PSY. Among its new features:
- The “Open GOP” option has been renamed to “oGOP”.
- Speed -1 and -2 are now supported with a warning when going below speed 3. Speed -2 can take over 8 hours for one minute of video on a Ryzen 9.
- The new “Perceptual Tuning” checkbox activates by default some of the new SVT-AV1-PSY features to improve visual fidelity at the cost of some metric scores.
- Surround sound encoding now benefits from Opus multi-channel optimizations.
- The video encoding defaults have been changed and default temporal filtering has been re-enabled.
- The Varia download manager has received visual improvements, a new icon and new functions, such as:
- Sidebar where we find buttons for all downloads, downloads in progress and completed downloads.
- A setting to adjust the amount of simultaneous downloads.
- Bug fixes and other adjustments:
- After three months of development, Gameeky is now available in its first public version. It is a learning tool in the form of a game engine, available in English and Spanish:
- A game launcher to manage projects more easily.
- A game client for cooperative play.
- A scene editor for creating and modifying game worlds.
- An entity editor for creating and modifying game objects.
- A Python library for a LOGO-like experience.
- Plugin support to extend game logic and entity behavior.
- An offline beginner's guide.
- The first theme pack to create role-playing games in a medieval fantasy setting.
- Zrythm 1.1.0-beta.6.3.11 has arrived with a new welcome window based on libadwaita and other new features:
- Many UI elements have been moved to the new libadwaita widgets.
- The viewers have been moved to the bottom bar while the header bar has been simplified/revamped and the secondary header toolbar has been removed.
- The welcome window has been revamped to look more like GNOME applications.
- Zrythm no longer relies on Breeze icons and some icons have changed.
- Fixed a bug when copying and pasting audio regions after a BPM change.
- Zrythm is now fully compatible with REUSE 3.0.
And this, along with some more points from the STF list, has been all this week in GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.