#240 Big Reworks

March 13, 2026 • 8 Notes • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 06 to March 13.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

Peter Eisenmann announces

For version 50 Files aka nautilus has retrieved many bug fixes, tiny niceties and big reworks. The most prominent are:

  • Faster thumbnail and icon loading
  • Pop-out property dialogs for free-floating windows
  • Reworked batch rename mechanism and highligths for replaced text
  • Shorter file operation descriptions in sidebar
  • Support for multiple simulatenous file type search filters
  • Case-insensitive pathbar completions
  • Dedicated dialog for grid view captions
  • Reduced memory usage
  • Internal modernizations including usage of Blueprint and glycin
  • Increased test coverage (23% 📈 37%)

A big thank you to all contributing coders and translators! 🙌

Document Viewer (Papers) ↗

View, search or annotate documents in many different formats.

lbaudin says

Malika’s Outreachy internship just ended! If all goes well, her work on improving signatures in Papers should land during next cycle. Read more about it here.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 says

I released libadwaita 1.9! Read the accompanying blog post to see what’s new

Third Party Projects

Haydn Trowell says

Typesetter, the minimalist Typst editor, now speaks more languages. With the latest update, you can now use it in Chinese, French, Spanish, Turkish, and German. Thanks to Dawn Chan, Philippe Charlanes, XanderLeaDaren, Roger Weissenbrunner, Sabri Ünal, and Sebastian Kern for their time and effort!

Get in on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/net.trowell.typesetter

If you want to help bring Typesetter to your language, translations can be contributed via Weblate (https://translate.codeberg.org/engage/typesetter/).

Anton Isaiev announces

I am incredibly excited to share the latest news about RustConn, covering the massive journey from version 0.9.4 to 0.9.15! This release cycle focused on making the app’s internal architecture as robust as its features. During this time, we closed dozens of feature requests and fixed numerous critical bugs.

Here are the most important improvements from the recent updates:

  • Flawless Flatpak Experience: I completely resolved issues with importing Remmina configurations inside the sandbox and fixed specific SSH password prompt display bugs in environments like KDE.
  • Memory-Level Security: I introduced strict zeroing of Bitwarden master passwords in memory immediately after use. Additionally, I completely dropped the external sshpass dependency to enhance overall security.
  • Advanced Connections: The native SPICE client is now enabled by default. For RDP sessions, I added a convenient “Quick Actions” menu (one-click access to Task Manager, PowerShell, etc.), and for VNC, I introduced flexible encoding options.
  • Code & UI Cleanup: I completed a major refactoring of the UI modules (some became 5x lighter!), which eliminated text-clipping issues in dialogs and significantly improved application performance.

I want to express a huge thank you to everyone who uses RustConn and takes the time to provide feedback! Your positive reviews and comments are the main thing that motivates me to work on the project every single day. At the same time, your bug reports and feature ideas are exactly what make these releases possible. Thank you for being such an amazing community!

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Mikhail Kostin announces

Vinyl is a new (one more :D) music player. Vinyl built on rust with relm4. The first stable version already available on Flathub and provides features:

  • Simple user-friendly interface inspired by amberol.
  • Basic media controls.
  • Lyrics (.lrc) support
  • MPRIS support for controlling Vinyl from other applications.
  • Save playlist and track/position of track, that played before the app close

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede reports

GirCore released new C# bindings in version 0.8.0-preview.1. It incldues new GTK composite template support and added bindings for GdkWayland-4.0.

Miscellaneous

GNOME OS ↗

The GNOME operating system, development and testing platform

Valentin David announces

GNOME OS now has kmscon enabled by default. Kmscon is a KMS/DRM userspace terminal that replaces the Linux virtual terminals (the ones from ctrl-alt-f#). It is a lot more configurable. So next time you try to debug GNOME Shell from a virtual terminal and the font is too small, press “ctrl +”.

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!