GNOME News Archives

Arriving late, a few days after the GNOME 3.33.3 development snapshot, the Mutter and GNOME Shell updates are now available.

GNOME 3.33.3 is out this morning as the latest development release in the trek towards the very exciting GNOME 3.34 desktop update due out this September.

Adding to the excitement of GNOME 3.34 and the many changes being worked on is Mutter seeing the initial merging of transactional kernel mode-setting (KMS) support.

Up to now the GNOME desktop has offered mouse accessibility support using the long-standing Mousetweaks program that allows for different actions to take place all from the lone input device for those that may be limited to manipulating only one button or other limitations around this primary input device. But GNOME's Mousetweaks only works with X11 so now Mutter has picked up mouse accessibility support itself that works on both X11 and Wayland sessions.

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt continues doing a lot of interesting performance investigations and optimizations around improving the experience of GNOME not only for Ubuntu but the upstream components. His latest focus has been on NVIDIA enhancements and now for the X.Org session there is a merge request pending to provide for a smoother experience.

While we've seen a lot of performance optimizations land in GNOME over the past year or two, we're likely to see more optimizations come now that Sysprof integration for GNOME Shell and Mutter has been merged that will allow profiling closely for missed frames and other performance metrics.

Christian Hergert of GNOME Builder IDE fame has been working on a round of improvements recently to the Sysprof tool he also leads development on for system profiling in determining the hot functions of a program and related profiling mostly around GNOME components.

As we reported was on the horizon last week, GParted 1.0 has been released after fourteen years of being the leading GUI-based Linux utility for partition/file-system management.

One of my personal biggest issues with using the GNOME Shell on Wayland has been the sluggish multi-monitor performance with driving dual 4K displays on my main workstation. Fortunately, GNOME is moving closer to resolving the fundamental issue and that could happen possibly with this current GNOME 3.34 cycle.

GNOME 3.33.2 is now available as the latest development snapshot in the trek towards this September's GNOME 3.34.

The Pango layout engine library that's been around for nearly two decades and used by GNOME's GTK and other software hasn't seen much love lately. Fortunately, Matthias Clasen and others are envisioning some improvements to this library and modeling it more around the HarfBuzz shaping engine work.

GNOME 3.34 feature development continues at full-speed with a lot of interesting activity this cycle particularly on the Mutter front. On top of the performance/lag/stuttering improvements, today Mutter saw the merging of the "X11 excision" preparation patches.

In addition to GNOME's Mutter compositor / window manager seeing an important fix recently lowering the output lag under X11 so it matches GNOME's Wayland performance, another important Mutter fix also landed.

The GParted graphical partition editor for Linux systems has been around for 14 years and finally it's looking like the version 1.0 release is on the horizon.

Adding to the list of positive changes with GNOME 3.34 due out this September is lowering possible output lag when running GNOME's Mutter on X11/X.Org.

GNOME 3.32.2 is now available as the latest (and final) stable release update for March's big GNOME 3.32 desktop.

It's been quite a while since last hearing anything major about the overdue GTK4 tool-kit release but now available is GTK 3.96 as a test version that positions GNOME's tool-kit closer to where they want it for GTK 4.0.

GNOME's Mutter compositor has seen a new, integrated clipboard manager for the in-development GNOME 3.34 cycle.

It's been just one month since GNOME 3.32 shipped as the latest and greatest work going into the GNOME desktop environment. Premiering today is GNOME 3.33.1 as the first development snapshot in the road to the release of GNOME 3.34 this September.

While missing the GNOME 3.32.1 point release that shipped last week, GNOME Shell and Mutter today experienced their 3.32.1 updates with a variety of fixes.

Last week I wrote about NVIDIA contributing a fix to KDE/KWin for avoiding high CPU usage when using the proprietary GeForce graphics driver. That fix ended up being due to the KWin compositor making incorrect assumptions about GLX swap buffers behavior. It turns out GNOME also needs a similar fix.

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the GNOME/GTK Broadway back-end that provides HTML5-based user-interfaces for rendering within web browsers. The HTML5 Broadway work has been revived ahead of the GTK 4.0 tool-kit release.

While Purism is engaging with several different open-source communities for supporting different operating systems and interfaces with their in-development Librem 5 smartphone, by default they are planning to use assets from GNOME for their default user experience to jive with their GNOME-based Pure OS desktop Linux distribution. Here are some new mock-ups on the GNOME side for this privacy-minded Linux smartphone.

For about one week already Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution has been shipping with GNOME 3.32. Here are some quick graphics and gaming benchmarks comparing GNOME 3.30.2 to 3.32.0.

Adding to the big list of changes to find with the yet-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit is some refactoring around the entry widgets to improve the text entry experience as well as making it easier to create custom entry widgets outside of GTK.

GNOME 3.32, which is codenamed "Taipei" given the location of GNOME.Asia Summit 2018, has been officially released on time.

The Flatpak 1.3 unstable series has kicked off starting the latest round of feature work to this leading Linux sandboxing / app distribution technology.

Barring any last minute delays, GNOME 3.32 is expected to ship today as the latest six-month update to this popular open-source desktop environment. GNOME 3.32 personally has me quite excited more so for the improvements -- and bug fixes -- over "new" features, but here is a look at some of what there is to get excited about with this latest update to the GNOME 3 desktop.

With GNOME 3.32 now buttoned up for release next week, the developers are already getting ready to kick off the GNOME 3.34 development cycle.

The GNOME 3.32 release is due out next Wednesday while over the weekend are the RC2 packages up for testing.

One week ahead of the official debut of GNOME 3.32, the release candidate will be out this week and GNOME Shell along with the Mutter compositor have outed their 3.31.92 release.

GNOME 3.32 already picked up a wealth of improvements, polishing, and fixing this cycle, but as we hit the final stretch ahead of the desktop's release in two weeks a big feature just squeezed in...

Over the course of the GNOME 3.32 that is nearly complete as well as GNOME 3.30 there was a lot of measurable performance fixes and enhancements to improve the fluidity of the GNOME desktop as well as addressing various latency issues. While in some areas these performance improvements make a night and day difference, work isn't done on enhancing GNOME's performance.

Released earlier this month was the GNOME 3.32 beta which also marked the feature/UI/API freeze. Out today is the second beta for the upcoming GNOME 3.32 and now the string freeze is also in effect.

Flatpak's Flathub finally supports the notion of application beta releases for application maintainers wanting to offer up early-access/testing versions of applications.

Geary 0.13 is out today as a big step-up for this GNOME e-mail client for the Linux desktop.

It missed the GNOME 3.32 Beta by a week, but out today is the WebKitGTK 2.23.90 release, the downstream of the WebKit web layout engine focused on GTK integration and used by the likes of GNOME Web (Epiphany).

Beyond the FOSDEM conference itself this past week in Brussels, GNOME developers also used the occasion once again for hosting a developer "hackfest" as they prepare for the home stretch in GTK 4.0 development.

GNOME 3.31.90 has been released as what is effectively the GNOME 3.32 beta and also marks the feature/UI/API freezes for this next half-year update to the GNOME desktop.

GNOME 3.32 is shaping up to be a darn fine release especially with the performance improvements slated to be part of this six-month desktop environment update due out in March.

Red Hat developer and lead Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) developer Alexander Larsson has announced the stable Flatpak 1.2.0 release.

Last week Purism announced the PureOS Store as their planned software / app store for their current Librem laptops and upcoming Librem 5 smartphone. The actual app store isn't available yet, but today they announced a few more details.

In addition to Canonical's Daniel van Vugt having been tackling various performance issues with the GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu developer has also been working on addressing various usability issues and other glaring problems.

In addition to the many big ticket changes being worked on for GNOME 3.32 like better performance and Wayland improvements, it also marks the project embarking on a big overhaul of their application icons.

Libhandy is the library backed by Purism for use on their Librem 5 among other potential use-cases for allowing adaptive GTK+ widgets depending upon screen real estate. It's still a ways out from version 1.0, but libhandy 0.0.7 was released this weekend as the latest achievement.

Now available for testing ahead of GNOME 3.32 in March is GNOME Software 3.31.2, the first development release for this "app store" / software center seeing its first release since v3.31.1 last October.

The lead developer of the GNOME Builder integrated development environment, Christian Hergert, has just led his project through its largest code re-factoring yet. Builder 3.32 coming out in March with GNOME 3.32 features more than 100k lines of code changed with various underlying improvements as well as some new features for developers.

GNOME developers are currently testing some changes to the Adwaita theme as a minor refresh to GTK3 applications.

While there has already been a lot of exciting GNOME performance improvements so far during the GNOME 3.32 cycle, even more could be on the way with there still being a number of open merge requests for enhancing the performance of the GNOME desktop.

The work around better GPU/infrastructure handling for GNOME 3.32 continues with the most recent work merged this weekend being for better handling by Mutter over deciding the primary GPU of the system in multi-GPU systems whether it be multiple graphics cards, notebooks with dual GPUs, or systems with a USB-based external display adapter.