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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
