XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.17.1 Released With Accent Color Support

XDG-Desktop-Portal as the portal front-end for Flatpaks is out with a new development release that brings accent color support to sandboxed desktop apps as well as other new features.

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.17 released last month as a development version dropping Autotools in favor of Meson, a reworked portal implementations, a new clipboard portal, a new input capture portal, mandatory PipeWire dependence, and a variety of other changes in working toward what will be the XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 stable release. Meanwhile out this week is XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.17.1 with yet more features.

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.17.1 adds a new ReadOne() method in the settings portal, a new config-based portal matching mechanism, documentation improvements, and the new accent-color key. The XDG-Desktop-Portal accent-color key is for an arbitrary sRGB color to serve as an accent color to windows.

The accent color support stems from this merge request that originates to June of 2022 for having an accent color for the settings portal as an easy way for users to personalize their desktop. This was initiated by Fyra Labs but with acknowledgement from GNOME, Budgie, KDE, Cosmic, and Elementary stakeholders. Implementations of accent colors for these different desktop environments are pending. This MR to XDG-Desktop-Portal just landed three days ago and so now hopefully the various Linux desktops won't be far behind in landing their accent color integration.

More details on the XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.17.1 development release via GitHub.