This week in GNOME brings exciting advancements in both developer workflows and user-facing applications. This brief article summarises the key developments in the GNOME project during the week of August 09 to August 16, 2024.
Table of Contents
Key Highlights
Improved End-to-End Testing:
GNOME OS end-to-end testing sees significant improvements thanks to a collaboration between Codethink and the GNOME Foundation, funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund.
This initiative leverages system extensions to streamline the development and testing process, benefiting both reviewers and testers. New CI/CD components are now available for all GNOME modules, with Mutter and GNOME Shell pipelines already incorporating these advancements.
X11 Support Optional for GDM and GNOME Session:
Furthering GNOME's transition towards Wayland, GDM and gnome-session can now be built without X11 support, mirroring the capabilities of Mutter and GNOME Shell.
GNOME Apps and Third-party Project Updates
There are some advancements have been made in GNOME applications like Wike, and third-party apps such as Snoop, Phosh, and Keypunch.
Wike
Wike, the Wikipedia reader for GNOME, has been updated to version 3.1.0.
- The most notable changes include migrating windows and dialogs to responsive widgets from libadwaita.
- Two new languages, Simplified Chinese and Hungarian, have been added to the user interface. Many existing translations have also been updated.
Snoop
Snoop, a file browsing and analysis application, has been updated to version 0.4. This update introduces several fixes and tweaks.
- The search path and string are now checked for validity, with a warning indicator displayed if a path is invalid or the search string is empty.
- Paths containing a "~" symbol or spaces are now properly handled.
- A "Remove" button is now available in the settings menu for uninstalling the Nautilus extension.
Phosh
Phosh, a Wayland shell for mobile devices, has been updated to version 0.41.0.
- It now includes a Quick Setting to toggle Wi-Fi Hotspot on/off, as well as a Bluetooth status page.
- The media-player widget now displays track position and length with a progress bar.
- Squeekboard has new layouts, and users can now silence incoming calls by pressing the volume down button.
Keypunch
Keypunch, a typing practice application, has been updated to version 3.1.
- This version adds Italian language support to the user interface.
- It also includes text generation support for Czech, Occitan, and Polish, with UI translations for Occitan and Polish.
For more details, refer to the official GNOME blog post:
Last Week's GNOME Update:
