GNOME News Archives

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.

GUADEC 2018, the annual GNOME developers' conference, has kicked off this morning in Almería, Spain.

On GNOME 3.26~3.28, if attaching a monitor to the system while suspended -- such as when setting up for a presentation with a laptop and projector/monitor -- when resuming the system, GNOME Shell would likely crash. That rather glaring bug has now been fixed in the newest Mutter code.

Those working on GNOME's Shotwell image/photo manager and organizer are baking a number of improvements and new features for the next release.

As the next step towards GTK4, GTK+ 3.94 is available today as the newest development release for this open-source toolkit.

While the GNOME tool-kit developers have been hard at work on GTK4 roughly the past two years and have kept GTK3 frozen at GTK+ 3.22, a GTK+ 3.24 release is now being worked on to deliver some new features until GTK+ 4.0 is ready to be released.

Canonical/Ubuntu developers are working on improvements to the GNOME Software "app store" and recently held an in-person design sprint along with one upstream GNOME developer for coming up with improvements.

Right now on systems with low amounts of available system memory, GNOME Shell can sometimes fail to launch applications due to an error over not being able to allocate memory in the fork process. With the latest rounds of Glib optimizations, this should no longer be the case.

GNOME 3.29.3 is out today as the latest development release in the road to this September's GNOME 3.30 desktop update.

Red Hat / GNOME developer veteran Matthias Clasen has recently begun a series of blog posts going in-depth with Flatpaks for those wondering how this application deployment technology is taking over the Linux desktop.

Epiphany 3.29.3 is now available as the latest version of this GNOME Web Browser.

GNOME's Mutter Wayland compositor support is among the few Wayland implementations offering support for EGLStreams so it can play along with the approach used by the NVIDIA proprietary driver as an alternative to the GBM API used by the open-source graphics drivers. One of the NVIDIA engineers has just furthered along Mutter's EGLStreams support.

If you try running the GNOME Shell today on the Raspberry Pi, it's a frustratingly slow experience. While some work is being done in addressing GNOME's GPU, CPU, and memory consumption, it might not ever be in a state to run smoothly on Raspberry Pi hardware.

GNOME 3.29.2 is now available as the second development release on the road towards this September's release of GNOME 3.30.

Purism has formally introduced "Calls", its GTK3-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) phone dialing application that it hopes will be accepted into the upstream GNOME project. Purism plans to develop this phone dialer using GNOME's Telepathy framework but for now is using a simple oFono back-end.

GNOME's 2018 Performance Hackfest is wrapping up today in Cambridge, UK after spending the past few days focusing on how to better optimize the desktop stack for RAM/CPU/GPU/power efficiency. The fruits of this hackfest will hopefully become apparent with the GNOME 3.30 release due out this September.

The current Flatpak runtimes are based upon the 1.6 FreeDesktop.org runtime but a major new version is in the works.

The Purism crew working on the privacy-minded Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone have shared off their latest design plans.

The second and final planned point/bug-fix release to GNOME 3.28 is now available.

Complementing GNOME's involvement in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, the GNOME Foundation has announced a new internship program aimed for more complex projects.

GNOME Mutter 3.29.1 has been released as the first development snapshot of this window manager / compositor in the trek towards GNOME 3.30.

The widely talked about "GNOME Shell memory leak" causing excessive memory usage after a while with recent versions of GNOME has now been fully corrected. The changes are currently staged in Git for what will become GNOME 3.30 but might also be backported to 3.28.

In the three weeks since GIMP 2.10 finally reached the release candidate stage a lot of changes have continued to land and today marks the GIMP 2.10 RC2 availability.

GNOME 3.29.1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards what will eventually become GNOME 3.30 in September.

Purism's latest hire to work on the Librem 5 privacy-minded Linux smartphone effort is a UI/UX designer who has long been involved with GNOME.

GNOME 3.28.1 was released today as the first point release to GNOME 3.28 that debuted one month ago.

With Linux PC vendor System76 getting more involved in the open-source software game since they began developing their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS operating system last year, their latest step forward is joining the GNOME Advisory Board.

While it unfortunately didn't happen in time for last month's GNOME 3.28 release, there are more performance improvements en route.

As a long overdue move, the GIMP image manipulation program now has support for moving the painting process off to a separate CPU thread.

GIMP 2.9 development releases have been happening the past several years and that is finally about to culminate with the long-awaited GIMP 2.10 stable release. Out now is the first release candidate for this big stable update to this GTK2-based image manipulation program.

GNOME contributor Yussuf Khalil has managed to uncover and resolve a bug in Clutter that was hurting GNOME's performance.

Following this month's successful launch of GNOME 3.28, the release team has now assembled the schedule for the GNOME 3.30.0 release and the 3.29 development milestones.

GStreamer 1.14.0 is now available as the first big feature release of 2018 for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework.

The GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit has just landed its GtkMediaStream / GtkMediaFile / GtkVideo / GtkMediaControls widgets for now having native multimedia stream playback support in the tool-kit that in turn is backed by GStreamer / FFmpeg.

GNOME developers previously dropped support for Synaptics and other input drivers from Mutter in favor of the universal libinput stack that is also Wayland-friendly. Canonical developers tried to get Synaptics support on X11 added back into Mutter but it looks clear now that was rejected.

The GNOME project has managed its Pi Day release of GNOME 3.28.

Assuming no last minute snafu, the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment will see its official release happen on 14 March, incorporating the past six months worth of improvements to this open-source desktop stack.

There is less than one week to go until the GNOME 3.28 release while today the second release candidate is now available that serves as the final step before the stable debut.

GNOME developer Federico Mena-Quintero has made a call to action for trying to get some support for improving Cairo, the widely-used 2D rendering library. Its own test suite is no longer passing with interest in Cairo seeming to wane these days.

Yesterday Purism offered an update on their Librem 5 smartphone development and how they have begun developing their own custom Wayland compositor. The latest today is one of the developers involved writing about the "HdyStackableBox" widget in development for customizing GTK+ applications for converging form factors / mobile support.

The first release candidate of the GStreamer 1.14 multimedia framework is now available for testing. GStreamer 1.14 is now feature-frozen and the official release is expected soon.

Following a slight delay, the beta release of GNOME 3.28 is now available ahead of next month's official release.

Taking care of a nearly eight year old feature request, GNOME Shell's Alt-Tab switcher has picked up the ability to close applications, similar to the functionality Apple offers with macOS.

Yesterday I wrote about GTK4 dropping the Mir display back-end in favor of the Wayland back-end. Additionally, the "big GDK lock" was also stripped out. The latest is some additional cleaning to lighten the tool-kit code-base by about seven thousand lines of code.

Last minute work ahead of the imminent UI/feature freeze for GNOME 3.28 landed on Monday for the GNOME Shell.

Released in time for this week's GNOME 3.28 beta milestone is the WebKitGTK+ 2.19.90 release as the GNOME platform port of the WebKit layout engine.

After adding the Mir back-end for the GTK+ 3.16 cycle, GTK+ 4.0 is dropping this back-end for the Canonical-developed display server.

A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place.

The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC.