Draft Releases Article

The GNOME project released two major versions during the 2017 financial year; 3.24 was released in March and 3.26 was released in September. Both releases featured improvements to both the user and developer experience.

This year, GNOME saw a concerted effort to improve support for modern hardware. Initial support for HiDPI scaling was added to Settings, allowing the size of what’s shown on the screen to be adjusted to match the density (often expressed as PPI or DPI) of your display, resulting in the right amount of content being displayed, as well as making it easy to read. GNOME also added support for machines that have two graphics cards. If you have this hardware, you can now select which GPU to use when launching an application. Finally, GNOME introduced a new color-shifting feature called Night Light. This feature changes the color of your displays according to the time of day. By making the screen color warmer in the evening, it can help to prevent sleeplessness and eye strain.

Recipes, an application containing recipes contributed by members of the GNOME community, was introduced. It offers an extensive set of features for adding and editing recipes, creating shopping lists, adjusting quantities and even has a hands-free cooking mode. For developers, it showcases the new meson build system and is distributed strictly as a Flatpak.

Web, the GNOME web browser, improved during the year as well. Additional tracking protection was added along with a new personal data dialog, allowing users to view and clear web tracking data. Web gained the ability to synchronize bookmarks, passwords and browser history with the Firefox Sync service.

Builder, the GNOME IDE, introduced a number of new features. It gained support for multiple build systems (including meson, Rust and Flatpak) by way of a new build pipeline architecture, enabling future build systems to integrate into Builder. Builder also added profiling support using Valgrind, introduced an initial preview of visual debugging, and added contextual documentation popovers.

Flatpak saw increased traction in 2017 as well. GNOME began hosting desktop applications on Flathub, a centralized platform for Flatpak repository hosting.

More details about GNOME 3.24 and 3.26 can be read in their release notes.

Written by LinkDupont.