Greetings!

I am incredibly excited for GNOME 3.26, and it’s been hard to wait for it. I openly admit this fact. This release saw serious, important improvements all over the places, new features landed, some others didn’t, thousands of bugs were fixed all across the platform, and I’d like to share my personal highlights for this release.

Calendar

As the result of a successfull Google Summer of Code project from Yash Singh, Calendar now supports events with recurrences. So far he did an outstanding job! There ain’t no secret in using it, and in fact it should be as simple as one could expect. Here’s a small video showcasing this new feature:

 

To Do

Another successful Summer of Code project from Rohit Kaushik introduced Todoist integration. This was made in cooperation with a GNOME Recipes intern, and many improvements to the entire stack landed.

Todoist in GNOME To Do
Todoist in GNOME To Do.

Builder

What can we say about Christian Hergert’s work on GNOME Builder? It’s simple wonderful! This cycle, GNOME Builder received a redesign UI, code indexing, documentation cards, debugging capabilities and a great fullscreen mode. The code highlight is working like a charm too.

GNOME Builder 3.26
GNOME Builder 3.26 showing documentation card and displaying the functions with ‘gcal_manager’ prefix.

After using Builder for a couple of years now, I can finally say that, as a user of the application, it now covers all of my big needs. I am really happy to see how Builder is coming along, and how my development workflow was improved by this tool. Really, it allows me to code much faster now!

Thanks Christian, you deserve all the best!

Games!

Games is an app that I have a love and hate relationship. I love how simple and straightforward and powerful it is – specially because I love retro games – but I hate how it tempts me to spend my time playing instead of working.

I think Games is the GNOME app that makes the best usage of Tracker currently. It literally just works. I can plug my joystick, select a game and play it. And, because it uses libretro, I can play the games I love the most: Playstation games. Even the ones with multiple disks!

GNOME Games
I’m terribly awful playing Megaman X6 🙁 Still fun though

Thanks Adrien for creating this great app 🙂

Flatpak

I didn’t say this before, but nowadays I only use the unstable version of GNOME apps through Flatpak’s Nightly channel. Also, I run Steam and Spotify through Flathub.

It works like magic. Almost literally.

You should give it a try.

Stability. I love Stability.

When I wrote my impressions about the 3.24 release, I was really frustrated about the overall experience of 3.24. Having a session that crashes every 2 minutes when you already have your own tight deadlines didn’t help.

Things improved drastically during the cycle, of course – thanks to the tireless efforts of Philip Chimento. He was brave to make himself responsible for a very core component (GJS) and work on it. He fixed all the worst bugs already, and the JS platform is finally advancing again thanks to him. We should really get him a drink, don’t you agree? 🙂

And I now realize that I wrote about those issues in the worst possible way I could’ve. And, from the very bottom of my heart, I beg the pardon of the community about that.

Sorry, folks.

My Contributions

This cycle, I did a few things that I’m happy. Specially because I myself will benefit from them as well! 🙂

Settings

You’re probably aware of it already, but GNOME Control Center’s UI was revamped and rebranded as “Settings”. I think that this rebrand, together with GNOME Tweak Tools becoming “Tweaks”, make it clearer and more obvious the different purposes of those apps.

New Network panel
The new, single column Network panel

The panels are now much more consistent, and the overall experience should be more streamlined now. It’s looking simple and intuitive, and yet we present the same ammount of features! I wrote about it in this blog post. Even though this work was huge, and I am feeling mentally tired after this battle, I’m also very happy we managed to get this done for 3.26.

Thanks for everyone involved!

Fullscreen Mode in Builder

This was one tiny contribution from my side, and Christian was the one that actually made it great. But it makes Builder much more usable on a standard 1366×768 screen, where I can’t half-tile it. This is how it used to look like:

Yay!

Moar Music Performance

Another cycle, another round of performance improvements in GNOME Music. This time, an issue in the Album Art loading code was killed with fire. Check this out:

 

Quarter Tiling, where are you?

This is complicated. As you know, I’m not a window manager expert. And Mutter is huge, with dozens of edge cases that I didn’t know of. This led to me spending a stupidly long time testing a high number of different setups and configurations.

The good news: the patches are working.

The bad news: they couldn’t make it for 3.26.

Depending on the willingness of Florian, and the acceptance of the Release Team, I can try and request a feature freeze break for 3.26.1, but there of course is a chance that this is not going to be accepted. Which is totally reasonable, few people are willing to introduce potentially buggy new features in stable releases.

Even if it doesn’t make for 3.26, I’ll continue to work towards quarter tiling and we, at the very least, can expect it to be very well tested for 3.28.


I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions. What are your impressions about this GNOME release? Drop a comment below!


26 responses to “GNOME 3.26 is great”

  1. […] you’re reading this post, please also read the one about GNOME 3.26. I’ll leave this post here for historical purposes, but you should disconsider what I say […]

  2. I wish Flatpak would work as well on my setup! Since several days, I’m encoutering this nasty bug that totally blocks me from using Flatpak anymore: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/975. Hope it’ll get fixed soon 🙂

    Thanks again for your great job on this release, as usual (and stay tuned for some more Games goodness on this cycle 😉 )

  3. Oh! Do you have videos for quarter-tiling by any chance?

  4. That’s awesome! I’m excited to see the improvements on GNOME 3.26, even without quarter tiling. Will half tiling be available 3.26, though? Congratulations and thank you for the job!

    1. Half tiling is already available, and has been for as long as I can remember

    2. The link you gave is for an additional improvement to half-tiling, to enable resizing the tiled windows.

      The core feature itself is already in GNOME and can be invoked by dragging a window to a side of the screen, or setting up a keyboard shortcut to tile to either side.

      1. Yea! That’s what I want to know if it’s in this release. Really looking forward to better tiling window management.

    3. then no: resizing when half-tiled is not in 3.26, as shown by the bug linked from Georges’ blog post that you already linked:

      https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645153

      1. Got it, thanks!

  5. Great ! The only thing missing from that calendar is to use a date-range widget* instead of two separate date widgets

    *(I don’t think GNOME has one yet)

    1. I presume the main benefits of that would be opening one popup instead of two, and perhaps getting shortcut buttons to select common ranges like last/this month, etc.

  6. Control Center’s UI is the best improvement for me 🙂 Good job!

  7. Loupianche Avatar

    GNOME Music cover/album loading is always too slow!

    Just compare with Lollypop…

  8. Yeah agree 3.26 was indeed an exciting *release 🙂

    *agree much with the comments you made.

  9. Good work on the new Settings shell. Congratulations!

  10. bugmenot Avatar

    I hope You are joking about stability as the main advantage of gnome 3.26.
    It. Just. Sucks. 3.24 was pretty stable and had decent wayland support. After
    3.26 I just couldn’t work because of X (or wayland, I tried both) crashes. It’s
    hard to believe sometimes that 3.26 had been tested at least in any way. I’m
    using arch btw.

    1. I have Arch as well with 3.26 coming from unstable first, now it is in extra, but, I had no crashes at all using Wayland or X session, even though I have many extensions enabled. You can try disabling them and see if it changes you experience.

      Worth mentioning that I use Intel exclusively.

      1. Do you use the modesetting driver or xf86-video-intel ?

  11. The problem is really that extensions are allowed to crash the entire desktop. Extensions make GNOME much more useful (even usable) but because the extension API was bolted on (from what I distantly remember of the history) they have the capability to crash everything. This should never have been allowed to happen. Hopefully they’ll redesign it from the ground up for GNOME 4 so that it can’t.

  12. reference2myself Avatar
    reference2myself

    Well after six and a half years of really sucking gnome has finally won me back. With just a few settings and a couple extensions I can make is usable finally. I’m using it as my daily driver again.

  13. I think gnome is improving, though a lot of the developers have their head up their butts. Take gnome builder for example. You CAN’T BUILD A SIMPLE APPLICATION WITHOUT THEIR BUILD SYSTEMS. If you’re lucky, you can get it to use the makefile. But you CERTAINLY can’t get it to attach a debugger and run the app. It insists on a very specific build configuration that they don’t disclose in documentation, forums, or anywhere. Sure, meson isn’t that hard to figure out. But people who use linux generally don’t like stuff shoved down their throat. It’s a shame because builder has potential. I’m finding the more I look into the codebase and the developers that builder is an allegory to the rest of the entire gnome infrastructure.

  14. Code_is_love Avatar
    Code_is_love

    Yeah, I’ve had a really frustrating experience with some of the gnome software coming out now, even though a lot of it has a lot of good ideas. Gnome builder is particularly crappy in that it holds itself out as one thing and it’s really meant for a niche group of developers. Stick to whatever cross platform IDE you can get your hands on and leave these people to their circle jerk.

  15. […] code n’ayant été prêt que quelques jours après la fenêtre de tir de 3.26, il a été livré dans une 3.26.1. Nous n’avions donc pas pu parler de ce changement […]

  16. […] code n’ayant été prêt que quelques jours après la fenêtre de tir de 3.26, il a été livré dans une 3.26.1. Nous n’avions donc pas pu parler de ce changement […]

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