The old GNOME mantra:

The best GNOME release is the next GNOME release.

is still true! Between backend reworks, Summer of Code projects and spontaneous contributions from awsome random contributors, here are the things that I’m looking forward with GNOME 3.22 release.

Nautilus

Let’s face it: Nautilus is heading towards a bright future and it’s getting in a very good shape – and the community that is growing around it is absolutely gorgeous. Obviously, this is not random; Carlos Soriano is working very hard to make it happen.

This leads not only to fun IRC chats, but tons of contributions. Nautilus’ codebase had its style unified, making it very nice for newcomers to send their patches. After a huge work on Nautilus’ internals, things are in a better shape now and new features are popping up. If you want a more complete list of Nautilus improvements, check Carlos’ blog post about it. Below, the ones that caught my attention.

Batch rename

I didn’t notice how a batch rename tool could simplify one’s life. I personally wasn’t confident this would be useful, but now I can’t live without it! Thanks to Alex Pandelea, we can do things like this now:

Integrated compressed files

Another detail that required lots of improvements on how Nautilus works is the integration of compressed files. This is the kind of thing that gives Nautilus a kudo for the attention to details. Having progress report in the Nautilus progress popover and a built-in way to create compressed files makes me feel like Nautilus cares about me 🙂 Thanks Razvan!

GNOME Calendar

This cycle I focused my efforts at GNOME Calendar. I already wrote about it multiple times, but in short, Calendar received:

GNOME Music

In one phrase: I can use Music now. My music collection is considerable (over 9000 individual songs) and GNOME Music simply couldn’t handle it.

Let me be crystal clear: Tracker is fast as hell. GNOME Music was slow to death. Retrieving the list of songs from Tracker takes about 0.25 second, putting the songs into a window and presenting it used to take ~85 seconds. Yes, that’s right, 340x slower.

Fortunately, this is fixed and will be distributed with GNOME Music 3.22 🙂

GNOME Games

This new app is surprising me. A lot. I was trying to play Spyro 3 – Year of the dragon for months, without success. Then I tried GNOME Games – without success too. But at least, I could report my issues to Adrien, and what a supportive guy he is! With his help, we were able to debug my failures and, surprise!, he fixed it right after.

And now, after a journey through different PS1 emulators, I can play Spyro again. I could only get it working using Games from Flatpak’s nightly builds – but hey, it works, that’s what matters.

Yay! That’s very promosing! (Although I wonder how much it will impact my productivity :P)

Gtk+

Thanks to the amazing team that leads the development of Gtk+, it keeps receiving a flow of new features, improvements and fixes so fast that it’s hard to track. This round, I was able to add a small feature, the CSS background-blend-mode property support. It definitely isn’t a big thing, but I learned a lot throughout the whole process and I plan to work on more CSS3 features like filters, blend groups and others (and finally give Lapo all the tools he wants to create his crazy themes).

But wait! The greatest thing that Gtk+ will receive in 3.24 (or rather, 4.0 if I understood the new release scheme correctly) is the Gtk+ Scene Graph (aka GSK), thanks to Emmanuele. I’m looking forward using it in a future release!

Not everything is perfect…

Some things didn’t make for this release. I’m particularly sad about GNOME Control Center, which received a new UI but won’t switch to it because not all panels got ready in time. Also, Nautilus’ actionbar wasn’t good enough too – we weren’t satisfied with the end result, and decided it needs more research and love.

Basically, everything I touched outside GNOME Calendar. Sorry, folks!

… but we’ll get there!

So now it’s time to start planning the next cycle – this time, I want to try something new and decide some features based only on community input. I’ll run pools and decide the priorities with that, ask around and really try to get the community involved in the whole process. Stay tuned!

I’d like to thank my employer Endless for allowing me to work on GNOME – it’s awsome that I can do what I love to do as part of my job. Thanks, Endless!