A few weeks ago we publish a weekly note of news in GNOME saying that Loupe was already the project's main application for viewing images. Since we weren't 100% clear on what this meant, we left it there. Now, the project has said that this app is going to be the one used by default on the most used desktop in Linux, with the permission of a growing KDE that is increasingly being installed.
It is important to note that the fact that an application is the official one for a desktop does not mean that it will be on all systems that use it. If a distribution decides there is something better, it will go with the alternative. But it is likely that in the medium term it will be used in Ubuntu and other distros with GNOME. Explained this, what comes now is the News list which took place from August 4 to 11.
This week in GNOME
- Loupe has been officially added to the main GNOME applications and is the default image viewer.
- In GNOME 45, uploading images via glycin is now fully sandboxed, including SVGs, and the print dialog has been updated with a new design.
- GTK 4.12 arrived this week. Among its new features:
- list views have gained support for sections, using a new interface
GtkSectionModel; several models in GTK implement this interface. - also in listviews: now programmatically scrollable
GtkListView,GtkGridViewyGtkColumnViewusing a fine grained API. - Finally, focusing on list views is more accurate and reliable.
- Lots of fixes for accessibility support, with better name and description calculation following the ARIA specification, improved handling of Composite Button widgets, and a whole accessibility overlay in the GTK inspector, showing missing names and descriptions in your user interface.
- the Vulkan renderer has undergone significant improvements; Vulkan support is still marked as experimental, but it's definitely less than a science project
multiple fixes in the GL renderer regarding mipmaps and texture filtering. - Improvements and bug fixes on Wayland, Windows, and macOS.
- there are some new divestments, mainly related to GdkPixbuf.
- list views have gained support for sections, using a new interface
- Maps now has an experimental vector layer, using the new vector map support in libshumate. It currently uses the OSM Liberty style. In the long term the plan is to develop GNOME style sheets that support light and dark variants, using icons for markers based on the GNOME Icon Library.
- Contacts version 45.beta is now available, powered by the GtkListView and GtkSectionModel APIs. This has reduced memory usage by approximately 20%.
- GJS has published a new version for GNOME 45 beta. There are various bug fixes and documentation improvements. The highlights of the release are performance improvements made by Marco Trevisan, and the JS engine upgrade to SpiderMonkey 115 thanks to Xi Ruoyao. The novelties that you will be able to use in your JS code in GNOME 45 are the new array methods
findLast(),findLastIndex(),with(),toReversed(),toSorted(), andtoSpliced(), and the ability to create an array from an async iterable withArray.fromAsync(). - NewsFlash has a new app id on flathub. has gone from
com.gitlab.newsflashaio.gitlab.news_flash.NewsFlash, among other novelties. - Gaphor 2.20.0 has come improving SysML modeling with new elements and the ability to assign types to modeling elements.
- ashpd demo has been updated to follow libadwaita's designs.
- Tagger v2023.8.2 arrives with new features and fixes:
- Added support to manage the lyrics of a file.
- Now offers suggestions when typing a genre.
- Fixed an issue where MusicBrainz metadata download would fail even though the metadata was available.
- Fixed an issue where web services would be disabled even though the network connection was available.
- Fixed an issue where album art was not saving correctly.
- An info button will appear when the MusicBrainz search fails, providing more information about the reason for the failure.
- The label panel design has been improved.
- Updated translations.
- In Phosh and phoc:
- In addition to no longer scaling the screenshots, Phosh switched to newer versions of libgnome-volume-control and gmobile. The latter was updated to support more notches (the ones on the Fairphone 4 and Poco F1) which were added to gmobile version 0.0.2 (also tagged last week).
- Phoc updated to new wlroots which allow us to add support for new versions of xdg-shell, but more importantly it fixes a long standing issue with GTK4 popups and onscreen keyboard interaction.
- The screenshot shows phoc reneting the rounded corners and the bounding box of a notch while phosh uses the same information to move the clock off-center.
- Parabolic v2023.08.1:
- Added option to avoid suspension while using Parabolic.
- Added ability to skip password dialog when unlocking Keychain.
- Added ability to reset Keychain when locked.
- Improved the bitrate used for audio-only downloads with the best quality.
- Parabolic will now prefer videos with the h264 codec when downloaded in mp4 format. If space is an issue, users are recommended to download in webm format that uses the vp9/vp8/av1 codecs.
- If file overwrite is disabled and a download's filename exists, a numbered suffix will be appended to the end of the filename to prevent errors.
- Fixed an issue where downloads with specific deadlines would download incorrectly.
- Fixed an issue where opus downloads would sometimes fail.
- Fixed an issue where Parabolic was unusable on systems without NetworkManager installed.
- Fixed an issue where Parabolic would say there was no active internet connection even though there was an established connection.
- Updated translations.
- Denaro v2023.8.0-beta2:
- Charts have been added to the Account view and to exported PDF files.
- Added the option to select the entire current month as a date range filter.
- Improved the transaction description suggestion algorithm with fuzzy search.
- Fixed an issue where the help button in the import toast was not working.
- Fixed an issue where Denaro would crash if an account had malformed metadata.
- Fixed an issue where documents were not available when running Denaro via snap.
- Updated translations.
- In the past week was presented to Deikhan as a new media player, but no feature was mentioned. One is that it remembers the selections a user has made (for example, audio languages or subtitles) for each file opened. This week, that feature has improved and can now recognize files by their content. In addition, support for hardware acceleration has been added to its flatpak version, screenshots have been updated, and access to files is only allowed when they are opened; before I had access to the entire file system.
- Cavalier v2023.8.1 has arrived with these new features:
- All draw modes except Splitter now have Circle variants.
- An easter egg has been added (run the program with -help to find out how to activate it).
- Fixed an issue where the app would not draw correctly with a screen scale greater than 100%.
- Added splash screen that is displayed at startup until any sound is detected.
- Added Cairo backend that can be used in case of problems with OpenGL. To activate it, run the program with the environment variable CAVALIER_RENDERER=cairo
CAVA was updated to 0.9.0. - Pipewire is now used as the default input method, it can still be changed back to Pulse Audio using the CAVALIER_INPUT_METHOD=pulse environment variable.
- Updated translations.
And that's been it for this week at GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.