GNOME launches welcome page at Christmas. This week's news

For some the holidays begin tomorrow the 24th, for others they did so before December and in countries like the one written by yours truly, we entered the 2023 Christmas holidays during yesterday's lottery draw. In any case, we are in or close to it, so we start this article talking about it and with a 'Merry Christmas to all our readers', whether they are users of GNOME o no.

And this is an article by news of the week, specifically those that took place from December 15 to 22 in the GNOME world. Among them, although it is not the same as congratulations, I think it is a good time to comment that the website is now available. Welcome to GNOME, where they talk about their community and how to contribute to the project. What follows is the list with other types of news, those related to software.

This week in GNOME

• With the money of Sovereigh Tech Fund:
  • They've redesigned some of the internals of homed to allow administrators to change user settings without the user's password, made efforts to change homed passwords through AccountService, and experimented with making session locking a via GDM. This allows homed to throw the encryption keys to the home directory each time the session is locked.
  • Added a global table browser to Orca.
  • They have cleaned up the keybinding and key-grab code, fixed bugs, and made improvements.
  • They've worked on resizing the bottom sheet, porting the message dialogs to the new system, and making it possible for the dialogs to always use the floating/bottom sheet layout instead of switching automatically.
  • Tested a new Tracy dladdr cache for call stack sampling, it significantly reduces contention with GJS.
  • V2 of the USB portal is now available.
  • They have made the screenshot portal use the GNOME Shell interface when available.
  • They are investigating the possibility of adding scrolling support to the Quick Settings popup, which would be very useful on small laptops.
  • They have worked to keep the symbolic icons at their nominal size, inside a circle.
  • They have made online docs for GLib/GObject/Gio using gi-docgen.
  • Added access to neighboring files to the file selection dialog.
• In Tracker SPARQL, new optimizations have landed thanks to which they will significantly reduce memory usage spikes and global memory allocations during the indexing process. Some new functional tests have also arrived in Tracker Miners that exercise metadata extraction failure cases and potential sandbox escape routes.
• At GLib, they've been working hard to fix a dormant race in GObject.
• Planify 4.3 has arrived with:
  • Quick Add Improvements: Now supports project selection, due date, priority, tags, and pinning.
  • Sidebar Filter Settings: It is now possible to reorder, hide filters and the task cutter.
  • Backup support: It is now possible to create a backup and import it from another location. Planify will import all your tasks and settings.
  • Offline support for Todoist: You were without internet, continue using Planify with Todoist, tasks will be saved locally and synchronized when the connection returns.
  • Error correction.

• Playlifin 2.0 now available:
  • Removed the "Logs" function. Everything is logged through the console or a file.
  • Added an option to disable SSL certificate verification (so it can work with self-signed certificates).
  • Added a status bar with the current progress instead of the Logs.
  • Added a setting to also search for Video, Audio or Both (Default: Audio).
  • Now uses libadwaita widgets in the header bar.

• Fractal has a beta available with these new features:
  • Fixed restoring sessions from Secret Services other than GNOME Keychain.
  • The hours follow the format (12h or 24h) of the system configuration.
  • Media history works in encrypted rooms.
  • Sidebar accessibility has been improved.
  • More notification settings have been added, you can now set global and per-room behavior and even manage your keywords.
  • Lots of refactoring, particularly the port to the macro glib::Properties from gtk-rs which helped us eliminate almost 3000 lines of code.

And that's been it for this week at GNOME.

Images and content: TWIG.