Infobars become much flatter. Maximized windows got rounded corners. Contrast was improved in many places. Several style classes were added, including monospace , keycap , flat classes for Headerbars, and more.

But Wait, There’s More!

In additional to the things listed above, we’ve made many performance and stability improvements, greatly improved localization, added more keyboard shortcuts, improved HiDPI support, and cleaned up many lines of old code. Plenty of new features and bug fixes were committed throughout the year that didn’t make it into this highlight post. Make sure to check out our previous blog posts for more info!

Behind The Scenes

In addition to software and web development, we made some big changes to our infrastructure and organizational policies and resources.

In January, we saw the need for our wider community to have a logo they could use in their projects. Our design team went to work, and Katie came up with a beautiful play on our ‘e’ logo.

In April, we made a big change and migrated all of our translations from Transifex and Launchpad’s Rosetta to a self-hosted Weblate. We also took some time to re-enforce our values and clarify our stance on advertising and tracking.

In June, we announced our decision to officially move our nearly 100 code repositories to GitHub. Since the move, we’ve not only seen increased contributions to our repositories, but more productive conversations in our issue tracker. Slack integration keeps us notified of changes and code reviews have never been easier. We’ve also set up Travis CI on the majority of our repos.

In July, we started ReviewsDay Tuesdays, in an effort to make sure code was getting reviewed in a timely manner. We also decided to bid farewell to the About dialog, opting instead to make app info pages in AppCenter much much better.

In August, we made some changes around the way we brand our apps and starting working on resolving some inconsistencies with app code names. The TL;DR is:

All new default apps in elementary OS use generic names (like “Files” and “Music)

We’re embracing RDNN as the one true way to name project files, DBus interfaces, resource paths, app IDs, etc (as in io.elementary.calendar )

) When we disambiguate between other apps with generic names (like GNOME Photos), we’ll refer to our apps as “elementary __” (as in “elementary Photos”.

In November, we released Granite 0.5, the latest release of our companion library for GLib and Gtk+.

Coming Soon: A New Year & A New Major Release

This month, we’ve been focusing a bit more on planning for the new year. Stay tuned for more specific information, but we can say two big things right now:

Loki is going into maintenance mode

After a team meeting this last Friday we’ve decided that in order to focus on getting the next major version of elementary OS released in a timely manner, Loki will be going into a sort of “maintenance mode”. This means that new major features will be built for the next release and Loki will mostly only receive stability and security updates from here on out.

Juno is already under active development

If you haven’t heard, the code name for our next major release is “Juno”. We’ve already begun work on the major headlining features and we have either completed or have working prototypes of several of them! We even have our first internal alpha quality builds of Juno using the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS repositories. We’ll have a blog post soon with more info and we’ll keep you updated on our progress up until Juno’s release!

That’s all for now! See you in the new year!