3.28 Release Notes Items

Changes in GNOME 3.28, 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 3.28.

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

Desktop

Belarusian, Croatian, Greek, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian dates are now displayed in the correct grammatical form (genitive).

Music

• Drag and drop support for reordering playlists
• Completed HiDPI support

Files

Starred items - users can now star files and folders, and they will appear in a special area in the sidebar. This makes it easy to keep track of files you return to a lot, or to remind yourself of files and locations you might want to use in the future.

In list view, it just takes a click to star something. In icon view, starring is available through the context menu.

Desktop handling was removed, to be reimplemented as a GNOME Shell extension

Epiphany

Google Safe Browsing - blocks websites that have been reported to be dangerous

Photos

See: Apps/Photos/Roadmap

Maps

Show thumbnail from Wikipedia in place bubbles (when available)

Move zoom control buttons to the header bar

Calendar

• Weather integration

• https://feaneron.com/2017/11/16/the-road-to-3-28-calendar-and-to-do/

• https://feaneron.com/2018/02/05/on-gnome-3-27-90-time-management-and-a-goodbye/

To Do

• See the blog posts for Calendar

Contacts

Support for favorites: one can (un)mark a contact as favorite. Favorite contacts are shown on top of the list of contacts.

Contacts can now be sorted on either surname or first name.

Minor UI improvements: a more welcoming setup screen, cleaner avatars, and a ShortcutsWindow

font viewer

• shows more information about a font, such as designer, license, features, number of glyphs
• shows the information inside the main window
• allows to scroll to big sizes

Cantarell

• GNOME's default font, Cantarell, was redesigned

dconf-editor

Big UI changes:

• list presentation changed, should feel less baroque;
• search results are now presented in a list.

Big backend changes:

• allows to map relocatable schemas, so that users could see all options of applications that use such schemas;
• watches for schemas added or removed.

Disks

• The redesigned format dialog now guides through the creation of partitions and filesystems step by step. It detects which filesystems are available on the system. Special filesystems other than the default choices can now also be easily accessed in the UI (previously this required typing the name).

GTK+

• Font chooser exposes variable fonts (sliders for weight, width, and so on, for OpenType fonts that support this)

• Less noisy font list in the font chooser

• A more polished HighContrast theme

• Middle click on scrollbars works again

Boxes

• Allow a free and automated download and installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Download many free operating systems right from the New Machine assistant.

• Transfer files with Drag and Drop (with UI feedback)

• Send Files option which creates a transfer's popover such as Nautilus File operations popover.
• Technical/Internal improvements:
  • Port to Meson build system.

  • Use GtkFlowBox for the icon view.

  • Store remote machine credentials in the keyring (libsecret).
  • Drop libgd dependency.

  • Move to GitLab.

Usage (tech preview)

• First publicly available version of the app. Tech preview.
• Performance (memory and CPU) visualization
  • Percentage speedometer
  • Groups processes per application
  • Tags processes of other users.
  • Force Quit processes
• Storage visualization
  • Tree view navigation (similar to baobab)
  • Pie chart (similar to baobab)
  • Selection mode (allows mass cleanup)

Settings (Control Center)

• User Accounts: new Avatar Chooser widget and new avatar images

• Default suspend to 20 minutes

• Remember last opened Settings panel

• Touchpad now defaults to "Mac" multi-touch gestures instead of "Windows" soft-buttons

• Battery reporting for many Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) devices

• Better PlayStation 3 and 4 joypads support (including clones)

GNOME Shell

• New on-screen keyboard. It works! Slides the screen up to keep text input visible. Layouts for different languages are supported.

• Thunderbolt support

  • Depends on bolt system daemon

  • Support for security levels of Thunderbolt 3 introduced with Linux kernel 4.13 to securely connect thunderbolt devices (which have direct memory access, i.e. could potentially steal your memory/passwords). That means that only if the user is admin and logged in we automatically authorize devices via Shell and bolt. If the screen is logged, the device is not authorized, but a warning notification is displayed.

  • We show a little icon while new thunderbolt devices are being connected, because it can take quite a bit of time.

Videos

• MJPEG videos are now supported

Clocks

• Add UTC and "Anywhere on Earth" world clocks (gnome-shell as well) (Blog, note that the screenshot has a bug)

Terminal

• Redesigned, unified preferences dialogue
• Supports new underline attributes (double, wavy) and underline colouring separate from the text colour
• Supports blinking text attribute
• A long standing request, "gnome-terminal --tab" now opens a new tab in the current window when run from inside gnome-terminal
• Ported to gmenu; so global menubar now works on unity without hacks
• Allows to increase line and letter spacing, for a11y purposes
• Allow passing FDs from gnome-terminal client when creating a new terminal tab/window
• Allow gnome-terminal client to wait for the process to terminate and then return with its exit status

Tweaks

• Blog 1

• Blog 2

• Volume above 100% feature (waiting on gnome-settings-daemon patches)

Quadrapassel

• Add basic gamepad support via libmanette (new dependency)

Games

• Libretro backend:
  • Render the games with OpenGL instead of Cairo
  • Add a CRT video filter
  • Add gamepad rumble support
• UI:
  • Make the collection icon view more compact
  • Exit games with Alt+Left/Right (depending on language) or mouse back button
• Flatpak: Fix accessing files outside the sandbox
• Replace the custom game controller support by libmanette

• Set the Retro.CoreView as the default controllers for the Retro.Core

• Dependencies:
  • Bump retro-gtk to 0.14
  • Add libmanette 0.1.2
  • Drop explicit dependencies on gudev and libevdev, they are indirectly needed by libmanette

Emoji

• Improved keynav in the Emoji chooser

Fonts

• Fonts can now be searched by name in the font chooser dialog

What's new in accessibility

What's new for administrators

What's new for developers

Profiler in GJS that can be used to see where your GJS-based applications (and GNOME Shell) are spending their execution time.

GitLab!

PyGObject is now available on PyPI and can be installed with pip.

WebKitGTK+ 2.20 builds approximately twice as quickly as before.

Builder

• Builder now monitors your project's file-system for changes to update the sidebar in real-time.
• Builder gained the support for drag-n-drop of files in the project sidebar and editor.
• Builder now tracks git status in the sidebar for quickly locating new and changed files.
• An overview of the build pipeline is provided in the build panel which updates as the build progresses.
• Builder now extracts progress messages from tooling such as flatpak-builder and displays it prominently in the project bar.
• Builder tries to avoid building projects immediately upon opening, and no longer auto-updates dependencies upon loading.
• Builder now uses a real pseudo-terminal for build output, allowing color output from build tooling.
• A simplified newcomers experience has been added, to click on a newcomer project icon and immediately clone/open the project.
• Editor search has been improved to be more reliable and predictable in usage
• The code indexers were improved
• This release focused heavily on stabilizing Builder for daily use.
• Three-finger-swipe can be used to move pages left or right.
• A technology preview of unit testing is included.
• A number of improvements to Meson, CMake, and Make project support.
• New templates including a Mono-based Gtk♯ application.
• A number of features were added in our Flatpak support, including support for Flatpak SDK extensions.
• Builder no longer requires flatpak-builder on the host when running from Flatpak, it is now bundled with Builder. This should further simplify the newcomer installation experience.

Handy links