After six months of development release of the desktop environment Compared to the previous release, around 28,000 changes have been made, involving 901 developers. Specialized Live builds based on GNOME 3.38 have been prepared for a quick assessment of its capabilities. and GNOME 3.38 is also included in the preliminary release of Fedora 33.
Starting with the release of GNOME 3.38, the project has begun to establish its own , developed as part of the initiative . The image is designed for installation in virtual machines managed by GNOME Boxes 3.38 and is primarily aimed at testing and debugging the evolving features and applications, as well as conducting experiments with the user interface.
For the next release of GNOME version 40.0 instead of 3.40 to eliminate the first digit "3", which has lost relevance in the current development process. The decision was made not to use version 4.0 for GNOME to avoid confusion and overlap with GTK 4.0. Intermediate patch releases will be delivered under the numbers 40.1, 40.2, 40.3… A new major release will be formed every six months, increasing the number by 1. Thus, following GNOME 40 in the fall of 2021, GNOME 41 will be released, and in the spring of 2022 — GNOME 42. The use of odd numbers for experimental releases will be abolished; instead, proposed test releases will be offered as 40.alpha, GNOME 40.beta, and GNOME 40.rc.
Key GNOME 3.38:
- Previously suggested separate sections with all frequently used applications have been replaced with a consolidated view, allowing users to regroup applications and distribute them into user-created folders. Dragging applications is done by moving the mouse while holding the click button.
- An introductory interface (Welcome Tour) has been proposed, shown during the user's first login after completing initial setup. The interface summarizes information about the main features of the desktop and offers an exploratory tour explaining how it works. The application is written in Rust.
- The configurator now includes the option to set parental controls for regular accounts in the user management section. You can restrict the visibility of certain installed applications in the app lists for a specified user. Parental control is also integrated into the application installation manager, allowing only selected programs to be installed.
- A new interface for fingerprint scanning authentication using fingerprint sensors has been introduced in the configurator.
- An option has been added to block the activation of unauthorized USB devices connected while the screen is locked.
- The ability to display the battery charge indicator in the system menu has been provided.
- Screen recording tools in GNOME Shell have been revamped to utilize the multimedia server and the Linux kernel API, resulting in reduced resource consumption and improved responsiveness during recording.
- In multi-monitor configurations using Wayland, it is now possible to assign different refresh rates for each monitor.
- The GNOME Web (Epiphany) browser has been updated with:
- Tracking protection for user movements across websites is enabled by default.
- The settings have added the ability to block websites from storing data in local storage.
- Support for importing passwords and bookmarks from the Google Chrome browser has been implemented.
- The built-in password manager has been redesigned.
- Buttons have been added to mute/unmute sound in selected tabs.
- The settings and browsing history dialogs have been redesigned.
- Autoplay for videos with sound is disabled by default.
- The ability to customize autoplay settings for videos related to individual websites has been added.
- The GNOME Maps application has been adapted for use on smartphones. In satellite view mode, labels can now be displayed. Support for night mode map viewing has been added.
- The world clock addition dialog has been redesigned to show the time based on the specified time zone. The alarm feature now allows for configuring the duration of the sound and the time between snooze signals.
- In GNOME Games, search results are now displayed in a preview mode that allows you to launch the desired game instantly. Games can be grouped into collections or predefined collections of favorites or recently played games. Support for launching games on Nintendo 64 consoles has been added. Reliability has been improved—games now run in a separate process, so if a game crashes, the main application remains unaffected.
- The interfaces for screenshot and audio recording applications have been modernized.
- In GNOME Boxes, the virtual machine and remote desktop manager, support for editing XML files of virtual machines has been added to modify advanced libvirt settings that are not available in the standard user interface. When creating a new virtual machine, Boxes now allows you to manually select the operating system if it could not be automatically detected.
- New icons have been introduced in the calculator, the webcam application Cheese, and the games Tali, Sudoku, Robots, Quadrapassel, and Nibbles.
- The terminal emulator has updated its color scheme for text. The new colors provide higher contrast and make the text easier to read.
- A new image filter, Trencin, has been added in GNOME Photos, resembling the Clarendon filter in Instagram (it lightens bright areas and darkens the dark ones).
- A Restart option has been added to the system menu, which can also be used to access the bootloader management menu (by clicking while holding the Alt key).
- A new version of the search engine has been added. , onto which most of the core GNOME applications have been migrated. The new version includes changes aimed at enhancing the security of applications delivered in the Flatpak format, thanks to the ability to explicitly control which data applications can request and index for search. Instead of a centralized database, a distributed model is now used, allowing application developers to store tracker data in the local database of their application. The index of the system file system processed in Tracker Miner FS is now connected in read-only mode. Full support for the SPARQL 1.1 query language has been added, including expressions like SERVICE {}, allowing for queries across different databases from a single database.
- In Fractal, a client for the decentralized communication platform Matrix, video playback when viewing message history has been improved — video thumbnails are now shown directly in the message history and expand to full video on click. The built-in audio player now has the ability to change the position in the file. Messages can now be edited in place with a corresponding indicator showing that the message has been edited.
- The libhandy library has been updated to version 1.0, providing a set of widgets and objects for creating user interfaces for mobile devices. The new version introduces new widgets such as HdyDeck and HdyWindow.
- Support for tracing with sysprof has been integrated into the GLib, libsoup, and pango libraries.
Source: opennet.ru
