#181 Happy New Year!

January 3, 2025 • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 27 to January 03.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

Mutter can now be built without fonts rendering support allowing to get rid of Pango/Harfbuzz/Fribidi dependencies. When combined with the previously added options to disable X11/Xwayland, we should soon be able to drop Cairo as a dependency in this build configuration. This change has 0 impact on GNOME Shell extensions as GNOME Shell cannot be built without fonts rendering support. Compositors built using libmutter, might need to include clutter/clutter-pango.h header where they use any of the fonts rendering APIs.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Shortwave

Internet radio player with over 30000 stations.

Felix reports

Over the holidays I have significantly improved the recording feature of Shortwave:

Choice between different recording modes (“Save Everything”, “Decide for Each Track” and “Record Nothing”)

Directory in which recorded tracks are saved can now be changed

Minimum duration for tracks can be adjusted

New dialog window for tracks to display further information

New button to automatically save desired tracks after they have been completely recorded

Ongoing recordings can be canceled

Improved notifications, with direct option to automatically save the track or not to record

Third Party Projects

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton reports

Introducing Refine, an app to tweak advanced and experimental settings in GNOME. It is an alternative to GNOME Tweaks, and is a pet project I’m currently working to experiment with PyGObject and dconf, while following the data-driven, object-oriented, and composition paradigms.

The entire codebase is made up of widgets that provide all the functionality needed to add an option. For example, instead of adding each option programmatically in Refine, the ultimate goal is to have it all done in the UI file.

For example, if we want to add an option to enable or disable middle click paste, all we need is the following code in the UI file:
$RefineSwitchRow {
  title: _('Middle Click Paste');
  schema-id: 'org.gnome.desktop.interface';
  key: 'gtk-enable-primary-paste';
}
That’s it. The RefineSwitchRow widget will do whatever it needs to do to ensure the option is available, grab the setting if it’s available, and display it to the user. Many of these widgets provide extra functionality, such as a Reset button.

You can get Refine on Flathub: flathub.org/apps/page.tesk.Refine

Everything else (source code, screenshot, etc.) is in the project website: tesk.page/refine, as well as the Flathub link.

Phosh

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido reports

Phosh 0.44.0 is out:

Phosh now shows the configured wallpaper / background in the overview (instead of just classic black) and has a button to unfullscreen on app thumbnails. We have done more notification style fixes (e.g. banners now disappear with an animation) and the configuration dialogs now use AdwPreferencesDialog (to be more mobile friendly) and GtkFileDialog to use the portal.

There’s more, see the full details at here

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!

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