#129 Hello 2024

• Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 29 to January 05.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects. Many of us were/are on holidays so we skipped last week TWIG. Here are the highlights for the past 2 weeks.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Further work by Thomas Haller has landed in GLib, eliminating some global locks which serialised g_object_ref() and g_object_unref() calls across all threads. The locking is now per-object. This should speed up multithreaded programs. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3774

Philip Withnall announces

Thomas Haller’s work to fix a long-standing race in g_object_unref() has landed in GLib main (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3064). Let us know if you spot any new crashes or misbehaviours with object refcounting!

Third Party Projects

dabrain34 reports

GstPipelineStudio 0.3.5 is here with 2024 . Happy new year GPS !

Here is the changelog:

  • logs: receive multiple log sources such as GST logs and messages.
  • settings: add a log level selection
  • rename gst_pipeline_studio to gst-pipeline-studio
  • can open a pipeline from the command line

دانیال بهزادی announces

Carburetor 4.4.0 released with a new OverlaySplitView to show detailed output and a set of main icons from Guardian Project’s Orbot.

Carburetor is an app built upon Libadwaita to let you easily set up a TOR proxy on your session, without getting your hands dirty with system configs. Initially aimed at simplifying life for GNOME enthusiast on their mobiles, it’s now fully usable with mouse and/or keyboard too.

Krafting says

Hello everyone, last year I’ve released Playlifin Voyager. It’s a tool to export and import playlists from and to your Jellyfin server. So you can reinstall your server and not lose your playlists if the libraries are the same. (You can also use it as a backup solution for your playlists!)

It is available on Flathub !

Parabolic

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2023.12.0 is here! This release contains many bug fixes for various issues users were facing across the app :)

Here’s the full changelog:

  • Fixed an issue where split chapters were not renamed correctly
  • Fixed an issue where videos would not download greater than 1080p resolution
  • Fixed an issue where preferring AV1 codec would not properly select av1 videos
  • Parabolic will now remember the chosen file type for generic downloads
  • Redesigned the interface for the Windows app
  • Parabolic no longer depends on psutil
  • Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Fretboard

Look up guitar chords

Gregor Niehl reports

This week, Fretboard was accepted into the GNOME Circle, an app for looking up and visualizing guitar chords. Congratulations!

Fractal

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

It is a new year 🎆️, and what better way to celebrate this than to release Fractal 6.rc? It has been only 2 weeks since our latest beta release, but we have been hard at work during the holidays.

Here is an excerpt:

  • Matrix URIs can be opened with Fractal, it is even registered as a handler for the matrix scheme
  • Our Join Room dialog now shows some room details as a preview upon entering an identifier or URI
  • The verification flow was rewritten to rely more on the Matrix Rust SDK, hopefully solving most issues that occurred before
  • Room members now have a profile page that allows, among other things, to kick, ban or ignore them
  • Speaking of ignoring users, the list can be managed from the account settings
  • The dialog to view an event’s source was reworked to show more details about the event

… and a lot of other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 6.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to contribute to an open source project, take your pick amongst our issues. Any help is very welcome!

Denaro

Manage your personal finances.

Nick reports

Denaro V2024.1.0 is here with many bug fixes to ring in the new year!

Thanks to @JoseBritto for working on the fixes for most of these issues :)

Here’s the full changelog:

  • Fixed an issue where the generated ids of new transactions were incorrect
  • Fixed an issue that caused sort to behave inconsistently
  • Fixed an issue where dragging and dropping an account file was not working
  • Fixed an issue where help documentation was not showing in-app
  • Fixed an issue where some ofx files could not be imported
  • Fixed an issue where the calendar was not showing marked days after pressing the “Today” button
  • Fixed an issue where tag buttons would grow to super long sizes
  • Added more logging to help debug issues
  • Updated and added translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Crosswords

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb says

A new version of Crosswords was released. This version was focused almost entirely on improvements to the crossword editor, with significant changes under the hood. The editor now features additional panels to help write cryptic clues, as well as grid statistics. Read more details in the release blog post

Cavalier

Visualize audio with CAVA.

Nick reports

Cavalier V2024.1.0 is here! This release contains some new features and improved drawing algorithms :)

Let’s dance our way into 2024 🕺🕺

Here’s the full changelog:

  • The wave box drawing mode now draws smoother bezier curves (Thanks @OggyP)
  • Users can now specify --fg aarrggbb or --bg aarrggbb command line arguments to change the foreground and background color of the running Cavalier instance respectively
  • Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Google Summer of Code

Bilal Elmoussaoui says

During Google Summer of Code, Dave Patrick worked on rewriting Bustle. The work consisted of:

  • Switching from Haskell to Rust
  • Port to GTK 4
  • Modernize the UI & codebase

You can read about the GSoC progress at https://seadve.github.io/tags/gsoc-2023/ and the release is available on Flathub!

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!