#210 Periodic Updates

August 1, 2025 • 7 News • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 25 to August 01.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

last cycle, libadwaita gained a way to query the system document font, even though it was same as the UI font. This cycle it has been made larger (12pt instead of 11pt) and we have a new .document style class that makes the specified widget use it (as well as increases line height) - intended to be used for the app content such as messages in a chat client.

Meanwhile, the formerly useless .body style class also features increased line height now (along with .caption) and can be used to make labels such as UI descriptions more legible compared to default styles. Some examples of where it’s already used:

Dialog body text

Preferences group description

Status page description

What’s new, legal and troubleshooting sections in about dialogs

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

revisto announces

Drum Machine 1.4.0 is out! 🥁

Drum Machine, a GNOME Circle application, now supports more pages (bars) for longer beats, mobile improvements, and translations in 17 languages! You can try it out and do more creativity with it.

What’s new: • Extended pattern grid for longer, more complex rhythms • Mobile-responsive UI that adapts to different screen sizes • Global reach with translations including Farsi, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and more

If you have any suggestions and ideas, you can always contribute and make Drum Machine better, all ideas (even better/more default presets) are welcome!

Available on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.revisto.drum-machine

Happy drumming! 🎶

Third Party Projects

lo reports

After a while of working on and off, I have finally released the first version of Nucleus, a periodic table app for searching and viewing various properties of the chemical elements!

You can get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/page.codeberg.lo_vely.Nucleus

francescocaracciolo says

Newelle 1.0.0 has been released! Huge release for this AI assistant for Gnome.

📱 Mini Apps support! Extensions can now show custom mini apps on the sidebar

🌐 Added integrated browser Mini App: browse the web directly in Newelle and attach web pages

📁 Improved integrated file manager, supporting multiple file operations

👨‍💻 Integrated file editor: edit files and codeblocks directly in Newelle

🖥 Integrated Terminal mini app: open the terminal directly in Newelle

💬 Programmable prompts: add dynamic content to prompts with conditionals and random strings

✍️ Add ability to manually edit chat name

🪲 Minor bug fixes

🚩 Added support for multiple languages for Kokoro TTS and Whisper.CPP

💻 Run HTML/CSS/JS websited directly in app

✨ New animation on chat change

Get it on FlatHub

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Want to get a head start and try out Fractal 12 before its release? That’s what this Release Candidate is for! New since 12.beta:

The upcoming room version 12 is supported, with the special power level of room creators

Requesting invites to rooms (aka knocking) is now possible

Clicking on the name of the sender of a message adds a mention to them in the composer

As usual, this release includes 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 12.

If you want to join the fun, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

GNOME Websites

Guillaume Bernard reports

After months of work and test, it’s now possible to connect to Damned Lies using third party providers. You can now use your GNOME SSO account as well as other common providers used by translators: Fedora, Launchpad, GitHub and GitLab.com. The login/password authentication has been disabled and email addresses are validated for security reasons.

On another hand, under the hood, Damned Lies has been modernized: we upgrade to Fedora 42, which provides a fresher gettext (0.23) and we moved to Django 5.2 LTS and Python 3.13. Users can expect performances improvements, as we replaced the Apache mod_wsgi by gunicorn that is said as more CPU and RAM efficient.

Next step is working on async git pushes and merge requests support. Help is very welcome on these topics!

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection reports

The GNOME Shell 49 port guide for extensions is ready! We are now accepting GNOME Shell 49 extension packages on EGO. Please join us on the GNOME Extensions Matrix Channel if you have any issues porting your extension. Also, thanks to Florian Müllner, gnome-extensions has added a new upload command for GNOME Shell 49, making it easier to upload your extensions to EGO. You can also use it with CI.

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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