3.26 Release Notes Items
Changes in GNOME 3.26, to be potentially mentioned in the release notes.
Please note that this page does not need to be pretty or well-written. It's just a list that will be used to make the actual release notes.
See also the advice about the schedule and translation.
Also see feature plans for 3.26.
Attention Press/Reviewers This is a work in progress. Items aren't checked for correctness. Statements may be completely wrong. Very large changes could be forgotten. Please wait until the final release notes are done. This page will not contain everything that will be in the final release notes. |
Contents
How-to
List any changes that:
- Affect users, administrators or developers.
- Are something people have been hoping for or discussing widely.
- Feature, usability, performance, internationalization or accessibility improvements.
Even small changes are interesting, and can sometimes be combined into wider themes.
Provide this information:
- What the module (application) is.
- What the change is.
- How it will look and work from a user perspective.
- Why it is better than what we had before.
Be as descriptive as you like. It is better too long than too short. Links and screenshots are very welcome!
What's new for users
Emoji support
- Support for Emoji input with Ctrl-Shif-E and an Emoji chooser dialog that is accessible from the context menu of entries
- Various improvements to the way Emoji are handled during input: backspacing, cursor positioning
- Color Emoji are now displayed properly, including support for skin tone variations and presentation selectors
Flatpak improvements
- IBus input methods can work with sandboxed applications
- Accessibility works with sandboxed applications
GNOME Shell
- Improved search view
- Has a new layout which shows more search items and snippets about each result
- You can now search for system actions: power off, suspend, lock screen, log out, switch user and orientation lock. Log out and switch user only appear if there's more than one user. Orientation lock only appears if the device has an accelerometer.
- New "app isn't responding" dialogs look better and work properly on Wayland
- Animated transitions for maximize/unmaximize and half-screen snap window states. Looks slick and makes it easier to track what your windows are doing.
- Refined activities overview - window titles now shown on hover and spacings have been adjusted to give larger window thumbnails. This gives a cleaner view and results in larger window thumbnails, making it easier to pick the window you want.
- Transparent top bar.
Settings (aka Control Center)
- New settings "shell" - navigation between different settings areas is through a side bar rather than a grid of icons. This means that the window is larger and can be resized.
- Allows settings to be grouped more logically, making it easier to find what you're looking for.
- Easier to quickly jump between different settings areas.
- New dedicated wi-fi settings area, which has been split out from networks - more logical, quicker to use for common cases.
- New detailed network properties dialogs - neater, cleaner, easier to use.
Display Settings
- The display settings have been redesigned. No more having to dig into lots of dialogs to configure your displays, meaning that they're less work to use.
- Display mode setting allows you to easily switch between typical situations and setups - single display, join displays, mirror.
Fractional Display Scaling
New feature for 3.26 - allows adjusting the display to be comfortable on high-definition displays. Avoids what's displayed on screen being too big or too small.
Software
- Improved updates - grouped updates list allows better handling for different types of updates. Updates should also be more reliable.
Web
- Firefox Sync - you can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox.
Photos
- New zoom controls. You couldn't zoom before. Now you can!
New Core Apps
- Welcome Simple Scan and To Do
Simple Scan
- New initial state provides guidance to the user.
- New action bar more clearly differentiates editing tools.
- Preferences can now be accessed from the header bar menu.
Logs
Blocks of log messages are now grouped (so called "event compression") - this cuts down on a lot of noise when browsing logs and makes the whole experience much more efficient.
Disks
- Resize partitions together with their filesystem (a dialog with a slider to shrink/grow)
- Create new image files and mount them as loop device (a dialog to specify where the file should be placed and its size)
Maps
- Added keyboard shortcuts to switch between street and aerial view as well as to open shape layer files
Additional information on objects are shown in the “view more” section in place bubbles and also editable on OpenStreetMap (religion, availability of toilets, and, when editing editor notes)
- Remembers last used mode of transportation used for routing on start-up
Polari
- Emoji picker in the chat entry and color emoji support.
- Initial Setup: provides a quick guided tour to set up your first connection with rooms.
Boxes
Shared folders between host and guest - https://alexandruvisarion.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/gnome-boxes-introducing-shared-folders/
System Monitor
- Per-process disk IO monitoring support
Evolution-Data-Server
- Offline work for remote calendars (CalDAV, Google Tasks, Exchange Web Services, MAPI) and books (CardDAV, Google, Exchange Web Services, MAPI), allowing users to add/modify/remove events, memos, tasks, contacts in offline, with later save to the server when the machine gets online. Applications like GNOME Calendar, GNOME To Do, GNOME Contacts and basically anything using evolution-data-server to get events/memos/tasks/contacts will benefit from this change, without a need to modify anything on their side (maybe except if they check whether the EClient is online and enable/disable certain actions according to it).
Evolution
- To Do bar in the Mail view - shows events and tasks with due date (or which are overdue) for the upcoming 7 days on the right of the Mail view, where users can easily see what they have planned, without a need to switch between the views
Tweaks
- Tweak Tool has been renamed to Tweaks with an improved design. For more details, see the blog posts:
Calendar
- Support for recurrent events
To Do
- Integration with Todoist (needs enabled GNOME Online Accounts)
Terminal
- Added support for hyperlinks
- Can now copy selection to clipboard in HTML format
What's new in accessibility
- Orca can now work with applications in flatpak sandboxes
What's new for administrators
What's new for developers
Glib:
- GLib unicode support has been updated to 10.0.0
GTK+:
- The gtk3-icon-browser tool can copy the icon name to the clipboard
- New input hints for Emoji input: GTK_INPUT_HINT_EMOJI / GTK_INPUT_HINT_NO_EMOJI
- Can add an emoji icon to entries using the "show-emoji-icon" property
Builder
- Preview support for Sphinx
- New preferences for features such as auto-save
- New plugins including retab, build notifications, and more
- Revamp of the user interface elements
- A new workflow that is "left to right" has landed in the editor as part of the UI cleanup. Sources of work exist on the left, work is performed (editing, etc) on the right.
- Improved application run support
- Performance improvements
- Fancy new animations
- SDKs are no longer automatically downloaded on metered connections
- Language Server Protocol improvements
- Todo plugin has been rewritten to be faster and use less memory
- A new keyboard shortcut engine
- Animations have been added in places where it makes sense to display to the user what has happened.
- Live code indentation improvements
- Updated fonts for the overview map
New project templates using Meson and adding JavaScript to language options
GJS
Progress towards more modern ES6 Javascript in GJS with SpiderMonkey 52. For details, see https://git.gnome.org/browse/gjs/tree/NEWS?h=1.49.4 and https://speakerdeck.com/ptomato/modern-javascript-in-gnome
Highlights:
- classes
- async/await
- many new standard library methods
Documentation for GNOME libraries in GJS now lives at http://devdocs.baznga.org/