#125 Portalled USB Devices

• Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 01 to December 08.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Areas we’re currently investigating:

  • Exploring the constraints and options for fractional scaling
  • We are looking at the state of speech synthetizers on Linux, particularly in relationship with the screen reader
  • We’re discussing the technical requirements for adaptive dialogs (bottom sheets)

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Tracker

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield reports

Some memory usage fixes landed in the Tracker SPARQL database library this week:

  • Fewer memory allocation operations when processing text (!637), thanks to Carlos Garnacho
  • Memory leak in tracker:strip-punctuation() fixed (!639), thanks to Lukáš Tyrychtr

Third Party Projects

Giant Pink Robots! reports

I released the v2023.12.7 version of Varia, a new download manager written with GTK4 and Libadwaita. Originally released a week prior, but now it has more essential features built in.

It’s available on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.giantpinkrobots.varia

Krafting says

I’m pleased to announce the release of Playlifin, a simple tool that aids in importing your YouTube music playlists to your Jellyfin server!

It’s now available on Flathub.

Phosh

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.34.0 is out. This includes an updated Wayland compositor (phoc) that works with the recently released wlroots 0.17.0 adding support for new Wayland protocols like security-context-v1 (to limit protocol access for flatpaks). We also fixed night light support and drag and drop on touch screens.

Check the full details here

Miscellaneous

Felipe Borges reports

We are happy to announce that GNOME is sponsoring two Outreachy internship projects for the December 2023 to March 2024 Outreachy internship round where they will be working on implementing end-to-end tests for GNOME OS using openQA.

Dorothy Kabarozi and Tanjuate Achaleke will be working with mentors Sam Thursfield and Sonny Piers.

Stay tuned to Planet GNOME for future updates on the progress of this project!

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!