#203 Infinitely Proud
June 6, 2025 • 11 News • Curated by FelixThis Week in GNOME, and this entire month is dedicated to the joys and struggles of all two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, inter, pan, asexual, aromantic, and non-binary people.
We celebrate the invaluable work of all 2SLGBTQIA+ contributors and users, across all different backgrounds and experiences. As a special highlight this month and to feel proud all year round, we have worked together to create two new desktop backgrounds, released with GNOME 48.2.
If your distribution does not yet provide the new backgrounds, you can download them manually from here:
We can’t afford to stay silent in times when history is literally being erased, and fundamental human rights are being revoked. Silence is complicity. We will not falter at this attempt to divide queer communities. We also encourage everyone to be as outspoken as they can be.
Never forget: We are stronger together.
In light of these circumstances it is especially encouraging to see the community of queer contributors growing steadily. We are here and we are not going anywhere - the GNOME community is and will always stand with queer people. We’ve got your back.
Events
Tobias Bernard reports
This summer we’re asking the question: What if we just started using GNOME OS as our primary OS?
It’s still early days for GNOME OS, but it’s finally ready for wider testing by developers and early adopters, on real hardware. Join us for a 3-month challenge from today until September 1st, file and fix some issues, and win a a OnePlus 6 with Linux Mobile or a limited-edition shirt 🌈👕
Blog post with more details: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2025/06/01/summer-of-gnome-os
GNOME Core Apps and Libraries
GTK ↗
Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.
Alice (she/her) 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 says
Heads-up: GTK changed
GtkImagebehavior when displayingGdkPaintableto strictly use the:pixel-sizeproperty and/or-gtk-icon-sizeCSS property instead of stretching the paintable to the allocated size.The change is available in the nightly SDK and will be in GTK 4.19.2 and eventually in GNOME 49 SDK, but not in any stable releases/SDK. If your app relies on that (such as for displaying covers or avatars), it may need an update.
GNOME Incubating Apps
Pablo Correa Gomez announces
After months of technical debt cleanups, architectural changes, and small UX improvements, Papers has landed a considerable rework of the user interface for creating and editing annotations. New simplified shorcuts have been added, the number of clicks to create highlight (and similar type) annotations has been reduced, and it’s now possible to dynamically change color and annotation type just from the context menu! This has been a greatly requested feature and truly team work between all Papers maintainers: Qiu Wenbo, camelcasenick, lbaudin, and me, as well as other community member like our newest GSoC student Ahmed Fatthi. We hope you all enjoy it!
GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries
Gaphor ↗
A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.
Arjan announces
Gaphor 3.1.0 has been released. Among the improvements are:
- You can copy from a diagram and paste the diagram directly as SVG or PNG in another application.
- Many UI improvements. Gaphor now feels more GNOME-ish than ever.
- For those of you that run Gaphor on macOS: Gaphor now has a proper menu bar
Apostrophe ↗
A distraction free Markdown editor.
Manu (he/they/she) reports
This past weeks I’ve implemented crash recovery in Apostrophe. If for some reason the application closes before a file has been properly saved or discarded, next time you open Apostrophe it’ll be restored. Then you’ll be able to save the changes, discard them or continue working in the file were you left.
Third Party Projects
Hari Rana (TheEvilSkeleton) reports
Starting from version 3.1.2, the GNU Image Manipulation Program will have the option to respect the system color scheme on Linux, thanks to XDG Desktop Portal and Niels De Graef’s merge request that was used as a foundation. Every desktop that supports the Settings portal interface will be able to make use of that functionality.
Michael Terry announces
Multiplication Puzzle 15.0 is out, finally adding a portrait mode layout, making phone play more pleasant.
Alexander Vanhee says
This week Gradia got the largest update it will probably ever get. It most notably includes 2 core features:
- Support for taking screenshots from within the app and launching via a custom keyboard shortcut that starts with the screenshot tool.
- The ability to annotate images with the staples like a pen and text mode, but also some more domain-specific modes like “censor”.
Thank you to all who contributed, including everyone who submitted translations.
You can find the app on Flathub
justinrdonnelly reports
I’m thrilled to announce the release of Bouncer! Bouncer is an application to help you choose the correct firewall zone for Wi-Fi networks. You may have seen other operating systems that, when you connect to a new Wi-Fi network, prompt for the type of network (e.g. home, public, work). That’s what Bouncer does. When you choose the network type, it is associated with that network and automatically used in the future. This can be useful to keep people from connecting to your laptop while using coffee shop Wi-Fi!
Check it out on Flathub! Please note that there may be additional setup steps beyond just installation. Details are on Flathub and in the README.
[nyx] reports
This week, I released a template for developing GNOME applications using TypeScript!
What makes this template unique? It leverages esbuild to transpile TypeScript code into JavaScript, offering several advantages: the ability to use TypeScript paths for absolute imports, direct support for importing .ui files in your code (similar to the functionality provided by gjspack), seamless integration of npm dependencies (as long as they don’t rely on Node.js or other runtimes), and support for modern syntax features like decorators.
In the future, I plan to develop a plugin for esbuild that will simplify the import of Blueprint files.
Without further delay, here are the links: GNOME TypeScript Template | GitHub Mirror
Crosswords ↗
A crossword puzzle game and creator.
jrb announces
Crosswords 0.3.15 has been released (announcement)!
This is a quality-of-life release with a large number of bug fixes and improvements. It also includes the first version of the editor that can generate acrostic puzzles. You can download it at flathub, and it will be available in Fedora momentarily.
Highlights include:
- Beta version of Acrostic editor
- Use C-O to open files from everywhere in the game
- Autodownload puzzle-sets on startup
- Highlight the first letter of each clue answer for acrostics
- Thumbnailer works with arrowwords
- A cleaned up “Save As…” experience in the editor
- Autofill selection vastly improved in the editor
- Word list speedups and fixes
- Barred puzzles render better
- Dividers render correctly
- Cell labels measure and layout text correctly
That last fix lets us display Arabic crosswords.
Happy Puzzling!
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!