#200 Two Hundred

May 16, 2025 • 13 News • Curated by Felix

Celebrating 200 Weeks of This Week in GNOME! 🎉

What a milestone! We’re thrilled to celebrate the 200th post of This Week in GNOME - that’s nearly four years of showcasing the amazing work, features, and people that make GNOME thrive.

From new features, fresh designs, bug fixes but also exciting app launches — TWIG has become a vital pulse of the GNOME community.

Whether you’re a reader, contributor, or part of the community behind the scenes — thank you for being a part of this journey! ❤️

Launching TWIG 2.0

Nearly four years after its launch, I’m delighted to unveil a completely revamped thisweek.gnome.org! Welcome to TWIG 2.0 — featuring a modern technical foundation, a refreshed design, exciting new features, and so much more!

Have fun with TWIG 2.0, I’m looking forward to your feedback!

And now, as usual, to the happenings across the GNOME Project in the week from 09 May to 16 May 😉.

Accessibility

Georges Stavracas (feaneron) says

Today (May 15th) is the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. To celebrate it, I wrote about the unsung heroes that keep on fighting against all adverse conditions around the Linux desktop in order to improve its accessibility. You can read more here.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

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

jadahl says

Mutter, GNOME’s compositor framework that GNOME Shell is built on top of, got a new developer tool this week, the “Mutter Development Kit”. This new development kit provides a new way to run a nested GNOME Shell instance inside a GTK app which will provide various tools useful for compositor and shell development. The tool it has so far is touch emulation, but more will come.

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad announces

Labels such as street names and house numbers can now be clicked to show the place information (and easily add them to favourites) in Maps. Pictures here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/snippets/7004 https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/snippets/7005

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Izzy (she/her) says

Binary 5.3 has just been released as a small update. It comes with many translation updates and a few small updates.

Development hasn’t been too active lately due to uni work and personal issues. I’m hoping to work on it a lot more over the summer and hopefully past that. In the mean time, get it now on flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.fizzyizzy05.binary

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas reports

Newsflash 4.0 enters beta which can be checked out in the flathub beta channel. In this release most of the UI code has been refactored to make use of all the Gtk & rust binding goodies that were added over the years. Image, Audio and Video attachments are now all featured more prominently. More can be read here: https://blogs.gnome.org/jangernert/2025/05/12/newsflash-4-0-beta/

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry says

Déjà Dup Backups just landed two big changes, to be released in 49.0:

  • A UI refresh to align better with the HIG
  • Restic is now the default backend for all builds (not just the flathub one)

Third Party Projects

vallabhvidy announces

Really happy to announce release of version 0.1.3 of Cube Timer🥳. Cube Timer is a tool to time your Rubik’s Cube solves. It tracks your solve time and maintains averages of previous solves. Solves can be organized into different practice sessions as well. It also has a basic scramble generator. The design of Cube Timer was inspired by cstimer.net.

It can be installed from Flathub.

Also Congratulations to TWIG for its 200th edition! 🥳🎉🎉.

Märt Põder says

Nautilus Compare, the context menu diff extension for Nautilus file manager (aka GNOME Files) is back in Debian repositories after five year hiatus. Although updated for Python 3 and GTK 3 already in 2020, the extension using Meld diff and merge tool by default and with localisations for 14 languages was only uploaded and approved about a week ago after months of intensified user demand and with support for latest GTK 4 and Nautilus 43. Extension is still available for earlier releases of Debian family distros in the Launchpad PPA, but can be conveniently installed from default repositories in current development and anticipated official releases.

francescocaracciolo reports

Newelle, AI assistant for Gnome, got updated to 0.9.6, introducing selective profiles and reasoning support for OpenRouter provider.

It can be installed from Flathub

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2025.5.2 is here! This release contains a bunch of new features that users have been requesting.

Here’s the full changelog:

  • Added the ability to pause/resume running downloads
  • Added the ability to specify save folder paths in a batch file
  • Added the ability to exclude a download from history in advanced download options
  • Added a Preferred Audio Codec option to downloads preferences
  • Added audio codec information to audio formats
  • Added an ETA to downloads’ progress
  • Fixed an issue where generic videos would not download correctly

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Due to a pesky bug that makes Fractal crash when our users attempt to start a verification, we are releasing Fractal 11.1 only 2 weeks after Fractal 11. And while we’re at it we also backported a few fixes for smaller paper cuts!

This version is available right now on Flathub.

If you want to help us avoid regressions like that in the future, you could use Fractal Nightly. You could even get rid of our remaining bugs yourself!

Miscellaneous

Georges Stavracas (feaneron) announces

Flatpak 1.16.1 is out! It’s the first bugfix release of the 1.16 series. Some highlights of this release:

  • Apps with the dri permission can now access /dev/udmabuf too. This may allow for better memory sharing and performance improvements in apps
  • Don’t propagate the Wayland socket from host into sandbox if access to the Wayland socket has been denied
  • Flatpak now looks for TLS certificates at /etc/containers/certs.d when interacting with OCI registries
  • Fix intermittent flatpak-portal crashes by avoiding unnecessary multi-threading. This should help apps and libraries that heavily use the Flatpak portal, such as WebKit and glycin.
  • When using parental controls, allow a child account to update existing apps by default, to ensure that security and bugfix updates can be installed
  • Make systemd scopes easier to match to Flatpak app instances
  • A couple of performance improvements in some specific situations

GNOME Foundation

steven reports

The Foundation Report is out for the week of May 12-16! It’s not any shorter! We’re sorry! ;)

Give it a gander.

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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