#232 Upcoming Deadlines

January 16, 2026 • 9 Notes • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 09 to January 16.

GNOME Releases

Sophie (she/her) reports

The API, UI, and feature freeze for GNOME 50 is closing in. The deadline is in about two weeks from now on Jan 31 at 23:59 UTC. After that, the focus will be on bug fixes, polishing, and translations for GNOME 50.

Sophie (she/her) announces

GNOME 50 alpha has been released. One of the biggest changes is the removal of X11 support from several components like GNOME Shell, while the login screen can still launch non-X11 sessions of other desktop environments. More information is available in the announcement post.

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan reports

Embellish v0.6.0 was released this week. I finally was able to make the app translatable, which was not easy due to me not knowing how to translate GKeyFiles. I also added Arabic translations.

I had also released v0.5.2 to update to the latest GNOME runtime and switch to the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.

You can get Embellish from flathub

Nathan Perlman announces

v1.1.1 of Rewaita was released this week!

To recap, Rewaita allows you to easily modify Adwaita. Like changing the color scheme to match Tokyonight or Gruvbox, or make the window controls look more like MacOS.

A lot has changed over the last month, so this post covers v1.0.9 -> v1.1.1.

What’s new?

  • Patched up most remaining holes in Gnome Shell integration, especially with the overview and dock
  • Extra customization options: transparency, window borders, and sharp corners
  • Major performance improvements
  • Added two new light themes: Kanagawa-Paper, and Thorn
  • Fixed issue with Tokyonight Storm
  • Now allows palette swapping/tinting your wallpapers
  • Added Vietnamese translations, thanks to @hthienloc
  • UI changes + uses Fortune for text snippets
  • Updated adwgtk3 to v6.4
  • New Zypper package for OpenSUSE users
  • Won’t autostart when running in background is disabled
  • ‘Get Involved’ page now loads correctly

I hope you all enjoy this release, and I look forward to seeing your creations on r/gnome and r/unixporn!

Ronnie Nissan announces

Concessio v0.2.0 and v0.2.1 were released this week. The updates include:

  • Switching to Blueprint for UI definitions.
  • Update to the latest GNOME runtime.
  • Use the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.
  • Make the application accessible to screen reader.

Concessio can be downloaded from flathub

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp reports

Turtle 0.14 released!

There has been a massive visual improvement on how the commit log graph looks. Instead of adding branches at the top when “Show All Branches” is enabled it now weaves the branches into the graph directly ontop of its parent commit. This results in a much narrower graph, see screenshot below showing the same git repo before and after the change.

It is now also possible to configure the menu entries of the file manager context menu entries.

See the release for more details.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Version 0.18.0 of Flare was now released. Besides allowing for Flare being used as a primary device, this release contains a critical hotfix that since Tuesday of this week (2026-01-13) some messages are not received properly anymore, which got worse on Wednesday. I urge everyone to upgrade, and check in with one of their official Signal applications that you have not missed any critical messages.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day says

Another weekly GNOME Foundation update is available this week, covering highlights from the past 7 days. The update includes details from this week’s board meeting, FOSDEM preparations, GUADEC planning, and Flathub infrastructure development.

Digital Wellbeing Project ↗

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) says

As part of the Digital Wellbeing project, sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is an initiative to redesign the Parental Controls to bring it on par with modern GNOME apps and implement new features such as Screen Time monitoring, Bedtime Schedule and Web Filtering.

Recently, the changes preventing children from unlocking after their bedtime and allowing parents to extend their screen time have been merged in GNOME Shell (!3980, !3999).

These were the last remaining bits for the parental controls session limits integration in Shell 🎉

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!