It’s that time again: another beta release! Before we get too far, I want to remind you why we do beta releases: they’re a special release intended for our 3rd party developers and highly technical users. Developers need a pre-release in order to test and take advantage of new platform features and to publish their apps so that we don’t release with an empty store. We also invite highly technical users to test Beta in non-production environments to find major regressions and show-stopping issues.

Since Beta1, we’ve fixed over 200 issues and gotten back up to over 50 apps in AppCenter built specifically for Juno.

For App Developers

If you have an app published in AppCenter for Loki or would like to publish an app for Juno, this pre-release is for you! During this Beta2 period we hope to see app developers get the rest of their apps ready to go, and we’re always standing by in Gitter and the Community Slack to help wherever we can.

If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you read about Houston CI and enable this for your repo. Houston CI builds and tests your app against Juno and will let you know about issues even if you’re not yet running the Beta.

Be sure to read our Updating Your Apps for Juno piece for everything you need to know about getting your app ready to debut alongside Juno’s stable release.

Gala & Greeter

We fixed a few issues around Gala, the Greeter, HiDPI, and related refinements during the beta2 cycle:

A new Gala Daemon provides better native GTK context menus for apps. This means that context menus scale properly on HiDPI, plus non-native apps with titlebars now also get a menu. Picture-in-picture mode also scales better on HiDPI now.

The login and lockscreen greeter is now more crisp on HiDPI. This is because we now have a simple compositor, which also provides things like shadows beneath the shutdown window and indicators. We also now use the same panel on the greeter as in the logged-in session, meaning indicators work more consistently, and you can scrub between them.

AppCenter

AppCenter has gotten a lot of love in Juno!

We fixed an issue in AppCenter where new apps were not properly being displayed on the home page due to a package ID format deprecation. Now apps should be displayed whether they use the old or new format.

Banners on the homescreen have a new glow on hover based on the brand color. It’s subtle, but more obvious on bright colors.

Michael from System76 also reported and helped fix several issues: uninstalled apps can now be reinstalled without restarting AppCenter, AppCenter should not lock up when performing multiple operations, and some warnings were fixed. We also added a few compile-time flags to make reusing AppCenter (i.e. as Pop!_Shop in Pop!_OS) easier for third parties.

The payment dialog was improved with a new icon to bring it more inline with other permissions dialogs, plus card numbers are automatically formatted to make it easier to type, and both card numbers and CVC entries are masked out when unfocused to prevent shoulder-surfing.

We also fixed the badge not showing up in the dock when there are pending updates.

Finally, we dropped some old CSS formatting that was required in GTK 3.18 since Juno is on 3.22, and removed the “Share” menu on non-curated apps since our new appcenter.elementary.io site shows rich metadata for curated apps but doesn’t currently handle uncurated apps.

Files

A slash is now appended to file paths when typed into the pathbar. Thumbnailing has also been improved, meaning renamed or new files should more consistently get correct thumbnails.

We also solved several performance and stability issues and continue to make the code base much more efficient and easy to read under the hood.

Icons, Stylesheet, & Wallpapers

The stylesheet now provides an “inline” style for tab bars. This means if an app opts into this style, its tabs can better match the content they’re switching between instead of always being chrome-colored.

We’ve also continued our quest for better contrast across the stylesheet. Notably, we darkened success icons in the light style for better contrast compliance, and improved checkbox and radio contrast between different states.

The stylesheet was improved for certain button styles in headerbars, including suggested action buttons and insensitive buttons in dark and branded headerbars.

We squashed a stylesheet bug that caused tiled dark apps to flash erratically, including Photos, Terminal, and Code with the dark style.

Additionally, there is a new “checkerboard” style so that you can use the same patterned background as we use in Photos and Screenshot with transparent images in your apps.

The new checkerboard class works with both light and dark styles

There are a bunch of new action icons including actions for moving objects forward and backward across layers (such as in presentation apps like Spice-Up or image editing apps like Inkscape) and more icons were aligned to the color palette. The result is an ever-more consistent look and feel across apps. We also added a new color version of the refresh icon in all sizes, since apps that need a symbolic version (like Epiphany) are already requesting the symbolic version. This makes the default/color icon more visible across both light and dark styles.

Folder icons are now a neutral manila color across the system, better fitting in with branded apps and opening up the possibility to use color in Files in more meaningful ways in the future. We also have new “open” variants of each of the special folders, so they look better when dragging a file into them or when the folder is open in another Files tab.

New Manila folders

We dropped the wrinkly walrus wallpaper and added a nice deep green fern wallpaper. Our lovely purpleprint remains the default. For now…