GNOME 3.38 "Orbis" just landed today, which brings in another 6 months of hacking away at all the tech behind the GNOME desktop for a fully modern Linux environment. The Orbis code-name is to recognise the team behind the GUADEC 2020 conference, which the GNOME team said "is only possible thanks to the hard work of many volunteers".
This latest release brings in some big stuff too, here's some highlights:
- The application grid got new tools along with drag and drop support for setting it up how you want
- A newly designed fingerprint UI and better login support for it, along with new parental controls
- Special QR codes to give other devices access to your WiFI easily
- A better Maps application with a night mode too
- Improved screen recording with PipeWire
- Better multi-monitor support
- Updates to the Games app
Check out their seriously slick release video:
Direct Link
Full release notes can be found here.
As for when you will be able to get it, that depends on your distribution. For Ubuntu, which has GNOME as the default, it will be in the Ubuntu 20.10 release and the same for other distributions with regular release cycles. For distributions based on Arch Linux, it will no doubt arrive in updates shortly.
Coming up next to GNOME is a new versioning system, which is currently being discussed here. The next release will be GNOME 40, due in March 2021. It will go through a 40.alpha, 40.beta, 40.rc and then a 40.0 release. Each stable release after will be 40.x until the next major version with GNOME 41 which will then follow that same pattern.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Neat!
> Different refresh rates
And here I thought they'd finally have different wallpapers per screen like KDE. Eugh.
QuoteBetter multi-monitor support
Because of EWMH MM support on GNU/Linux is not very good (you simply can't have workspaces on different monitors be independent of each other). WMs which break EWMH compatibility (like Awesome with its Tags) are therefore doing a good job of pushing usability forward. But those lack the surrounding infrastructure of a full DE so everything is terrible for ever until we get rid of EWMH.
Sorry, I was ranting. To get back on topic: it's good that GNOME has been updated, but they should really try and get along with others (we were talking about getting GTK theme colours on the Emacs Devel mailing list.
Edit: Too much excitement! Got the release version of mutter, but gnome-shell was only version 3.37.92-3. I'm sure it will be updated any minute though.
Last edited by Brisse on 16 September 2020 at 5:35 pm UTC
Mountain Man Sep 16, 2020
Nah, let's just drop the 3 prefix.
Quoting: Mountain ManSo it's pronounced "guh nome", huh?
I think that was inherited from "guh new" (it is/was GNU Network Object Model Environment).
KDE is/was Kool Desktop Environment.
I say "is/was" on those because I'm not sure if they have retained their original acronyms?
wvstolzing Sep 16, 2020
Quoting: PhlebiacI say "is/was" on those because I'm not sure if they have retained their original acronyms?
I wonder if they tried to come up with a recursive acronym ('backronym', that is) at any point.
GNOME has NO MErcy.
Last edited by wvstolzing on 16 September 2020 at 11:47 pm UTC
Quoting: tmtvlWhat's EWMH?QuoteBetter multi-monitor support
Because of EWMH MM support on GNU/Linux is not very good (you simply can't have workspaces on different monitors be independent of each other). WMs which break EWMH compatibility (like Awesome with its Tags) are therefore doing a good job of pushing usability forward. But those lack the surrounding infrastructure of a full DE so everything is terrible for ever until we get rid of EWMH.
Sorry, I was ranting. To get back on topic: it's good that GNOME has been updated, but they should really try and get along with others (we were talking about getting GTK theme colours on the Emacs Devel mailing list.
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