If there was one thing that made me switch to Linux many years ago, I think it was performance and no-blue-screens. Performance has always been good, but sometimes they tweak something and you find it can be even better. It's something you notice when going from X11 to Wayland, for example, and GNOME has anticipated that we will also notice it when using Mutter, the display server for Wayland and X11.
It is the first of the novelties that have advanced us this week. The detailed information posted Michel Dänzer on the GNOME blog, where he has also posted a proof of concept of this on Fedora. What follows is one of those weekly lists that talk about some news that have arrived to GNOME and others to come.
This week in GNOME
- Among the hundreds of changes included in Mutter 44, one of them stands out: Mutter is no longer affected by GPU-intensive applications and games, and can maintain stable framerates when they are running.
- In Libadwaita, AdwPreferencesPage now has a property
descriptionwhich makes it easy to display the description on the entire preferences page. On the other hand, AdwSwitchRow has been included so that common cases have a row with a simple change easier.
- New stable version of ASHPD, a Rust wrapper around freedesktop portals. This release contains many improvements to its API and makes it much easier to use portals from Rust. They also have a new demo on Flathub that includes:
- Support for multi-camera.
- In notifications, support for setting default action/action target, allowing to add buttons.
- Email supports adding sdfiles together.
- Now use libadwaita widgets.
- Fixed application responsiveness:
- Now available on Flathub is the ASCII Images app, which uses jp2a to display PNG and JPEG images in ASCII format.
- This week Telegraph has also arrived, and it is not an application that has to do with Telegram as some of you may have thought (I do). Its developer says it's a silly little app for writing and decoding Morse code. He'll say it's silly, but I find it interesting.
- After a year of development, the first version of oo7 is now available. It is a Rust library intended to provide an alternative to libsecret, with tight integration with the secret portal and a way for applications to migrate their secrets from a host to the keyring sandbox.
- Tube Converter, a regular in this type of article, now has v2023.3.1 available, with many fixes and GNOME 44 base:
- Fixed an issue where the user might not download playlists with missing videos.
- Fixed an issue where some videos could not be downloaded when embedding metadata.
- Fixed an issue that prevented downloading of videos with invalid file name characters.
- UX/UI improvements (including moving Adw.MessageDialog dialogs to Adw.Window)
- Flare 0.7.0 has arrived during this week. The most important thing about this release is that the user interface has been greatly improved. Apart from that, Flare now also integrates feedback, has received support for profile names and a few other small features, fixes and changes. For those who don't know him, he is an unofficial client of Signal. And while it's not mentioned in the weekly GNOME article, it's received a bug fix today.
- This week Cartridges has also arrived, whose name translated into Spanish is "cartridges". And it is that it is a game launcher based on Libadwaita, and although more modern games appear in its documentation, it seems that the name pays homage to the classic consoles, since they were the ones that used those cartridges. The project was born as a personal need of the developer, something that would allow him to launch any game on any platform with a single click, without the need to use another game library. Right now it supports importing games from Steam, Heroic and Bottles without logging in. More fonts will come in the future.
And that has been all, or almost all, this week in GNOME. In it original link, where information and images come from, also talk about the GNOME Foundation and GUADEC 2023.