GNOME News Archives

The GNOME desktop environment advanced in 2018 especially when it came to its rather mature Wayland compositor support plus a lot of minor usability fixes ("paper cuts"), the PipeWire remote desktop/recording capabilities, continuing to mature Flatpak, performance improvements, and other changes to polish off the "GNOME 3" experience this year.

With the upcoming Flatpak 1.2 release for app sandboxing, the command-line experience will be much better for those that prefer the CLI to the graphical utilities around Flatpaks.

GNOME 3.31.3 was released today as the latest development stepping stone towards next March's GNOME 3.32 desktop environment update.

It's been a busy week in GNOME's Mutter space as in addition to the GPU hot-plugging and DisplayLink improvements, Mutter when running as a Wayland compositor will now behave correctly when setup for non-60Hz display refresh rates.

GNOME's Mutter compositor native back-end will now deal with GPU hot-plugging at run-time and begin managing its display outputs.

An improvement was merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor / window manager that should allow it to perform much better in multi-GPU setups, particularly for scenarios where the display is driven via a USB-based DisplayLink adapter.

If you are/were a fan of Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment, Unite-Shell is one of the most promising efforts to date for making the current GNOME 3 stack more like Unity.

GNOME 3.31.2 is out this Friday as the latest development release in the trek towards next March's GNOME 3.32 release.

New development releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter are out today in the 3.31 development series along with new 3.30 stable point releases that back-port more fixes for these important pieces to the GNOME desktop.

In addition to this week bringing KDE Connect 1.10 for the communication/integration between the KDE desktop and Android smartphones/tablets, GSConnect as the GNOME Shell port of this open-source software also received a new feature release.

GNOME's Mutter window manager / compositor picked up Meson build system support today and in the process received various clean-ups like dropping OpenGL ES 1.x support.

GNOME 3.30.2 is now available as the second and final point release to this half-year update to the GNOME desktop environment.

Fedora Workstation 30 will continue to use the GNOME Shell by default (more than likely, GNOME 3.32) but adding to the list of alternative desktop environments could be the elementaryOS' Pantheon Desktop. Pantheon has been available for a few releases on Fedora, but this change proposal is about upgrading the desktop.

GNOME developers want to make sure they have a competitive text rendering stack with other platforms and as such are looking to make some modernization improvements to Pango.

GNOME's Geoclue library that provides a D-Bus service for location information based on GPS receivers, 3G modems, GeoIP, or even WiFi-based geolocation has been baking a lot of changes.

GNOME 3.31.1 was released on Thursday as the first step towards the GNOME 3.32 desktop update due out in March.

With the Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone not shipping now until at least April 2019, this will give them time to adopt GNOME 3.32 and they are hoping more GNOME applications will prepare for convergence.

Another visible change coming to the GNOME Shell environment is the removal of application menus "app menus" for what had been an early GNOME 3 feature.

Released at the end of September was GNOME 3.30.1 as the first and only point release collection to the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment feature update that debuted earlier in September. Finally out today are the v3.30.1 updates for Mutter and the GNOME Shell.

Prolific open-source developer Matthias Clasen at Red Hat has shared some of the post-1.0 plans for the Flatpak app sandboxing/distribution tech. As it stands now, Flatpak 1.2 will likely be out around the end of the calendar year with the next batch of features.

The GNOME release team has made available GNOME 3.30.1 as the first and only planned point release to the GNOME 3.30 series.

Sam Spilsbury who was the former Compiz lead developer at Canonical and involved in the Unity desktop shell development is creating a new library spun out of Compiz.

GNOME 3.30 has been officially released as the latest major feature release for the GNOME Shell desktop and associated components.

The GNOME Foundation received a $400k donation of which $100k is heading to the GIMP developers for helping to improve their open-source image manipulation program that for some can compete with Adobe's Photoshop functionality.

With GNOME 3.30 releasing today, the GNOME release team has already finalized the release schedule for the next development cycle.

GNOME 3.30 is releasing today as the newest feature release for this open-source desktop environment on its usual six-month release cadence.

With GNOME 3.30 due to be released this week, GNOME-Tweaks 3.30 has been released as being ready to tweak this latest flagship open-source desktop environment.

Friday night marked the release of GNOME 3.29.92 that serves as the second and final release candidate ahead of next week's GNOME 3.30 six-month desktop update.

GNOME's Usage application that allows visualizing processor, memory, disk, and network usage may soon be able to report your system's power consumption data.

For those of you that have missed the ability to have desktop icons on the GNOME Shell desktop since the support was dropped from Nautilus, it's now sort of back thanks to GNOME developer Carlos Soriano.

Now that Flatpak 1.0 was released yesterday, what's next for this leading Linux app sandboxing and distribution framework?

They didn't make it out in time for last week's GNOME 3.29.91 release but updates to Mutter and GNOME Shell are now available in their near-final state ahead of the upcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop update.

Flatpak 1.0.0 has been released this morning as their new stable release series for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech that previously was known as XDG-App.

Today marks 21 years since the GNOME desktop environment project was started by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. Coincidentally, released today is GNOME 3.29.91 that is the GNOME 3.30 desktop's second beta release.

If you have been less than satisfied with the user-interface of the Pitivi non-linear open-source video editor for Linux, you may want to try out their next release.

Flatpak now has access to an updated FreeDesktop SDK runtime that is built on their new BuildStream build system rather than Yocto and has other improvements.

The GNOME Software center for installing and updating of programs will begin automatically installing updates with the upcoming GNOME 3.30 release albeit limited to sandboxed Flatpak programs.

The GNOME 3.30 Release Candidate (v3.29.90) is now available that also marks the UI, API, and feature freezes for this next desktop environment update debuting in September.

The GNOME 3.30 beta is being prepped for release and the UI/API/ABI freezes are now in place ahead of this desktop environment update to ship as stable in September. GNOME Shell and Mutter have staged their latest development releases for testing.

Longtime GNOME developer and Red Hat engineering manager Jiri Eischmann has looked at recent Fedora Workstation crashes and other problems happening with the GNOME Shell and the most common denominator is problems caused by the GNOME Shell extensions written in JavaScript.

Feature development on GNOME 3.30 is nearing the end ahead of the stable desktop environment update premiering in September. Nautilus developer Carlos Soriano has provided a look at some of the improvements coming to GNOME's file manager for the 3.30 milestone.

GNOME 3.29.4 was released on Friday night as another step towards this September's stable release of GNOME 3.30.

GNOME 3.29.4 is coming out this week as the latest development release building up to GNOME 3.30 this September. GNOME Shell and Mutter have put out their latest releases for this development milestone.

While GTK4 likely isn't coming out until next spring, the Nautilus file manager port to this updated tool-kit is well underway.

At the recent GUADEC 2018 conference in Spain, GNOME developers plotted the imminent Flatpak 1.0 release as well as what's coming after the big 1.0 milestone.

GNOME 3.30 is looking like Mutter will be quite fit with the ability to remove its dependence on X11 code and various performance tuning optimizations. On top of already landed performance work in recent months, more optimizations have just landed and it looks like more could still be on the way.

While the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit was previously talked about for release by the end of 2018, that's now looking more like spring of 2019 when this next major version will be released.

The GLib low-level GNOME library while being quite mature is seeing a significant update with its version 2.58 release due out this September for GNOME 3.30.

Fulfilling a 6+ year desire, GNOME's GLib library now has a generic memory reference counting API.

While GNOME's Wayland support has been in great shape with the Mutter compositor, it has depended upon X11/XWayland code even when starting with pure Wayland support. That's now changing and there is also now the optional "--no-x11" flag for starting the compositor without X11 support.