GNOME News: GNOME 3.12, Wayland, Numix, GTK+...
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-05 13:16:46 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-05 13:20:55 UTC
GNOME Core
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For developers and early adopters wishing to test the latest GNOME 3.12 packages built for Fedora 20, there's now F20 GNOME 3.12 on Copr for those wishing to volunteer and test to ensure the stable GNOME 3.12.0 experience will be good on Fedora 20. Ankur Sinha wrote more about this on his personal blog.
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A few weeks after the rumors that RAID support will be removed from the Disks application of the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment surfaced, the GNOME Project has finally released this past weekend a first development version of the upcoming GNOME Disk Utility 3.12 software.
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Unlike the past few releases, there's a ton of new stuff in GNOME 3.12. The highlights include a slew of new apps, a major makeover for the long-standing video player, better privacy controls, support for jump lists and quite a few other interface tweaks that make GNOME 3.12 more pleasant to use.
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The GNOME Project, through Florian Müllner, has announced that the fourth maintenance release of the stable GNOME Shell user interface for the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment is now available for download.
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First of all, we should mention that the GNOME Display Manager 3.12 Beta 1 release brings many code cleanups and fixes several memory leaks that were discovered in previous builds. Second of all, it fixes compilation issues for the FreeBSD operating system and updates numerous translations.
Wayland
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While a lot of headway has been made during the GNOME 3.10 and 3.12 development cycles for allowing the GNOME Shell and rest of the desktop run natively on Wayland without a hard dependency on X11, it was decided that enabling the Wayland support by default will not happen now until at least GNOME 3.14. GNOME 3.12 will still work as a very reasonable Wayland tech preview, but there's some unfinished tasks to be addressed.
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Gnome developers have been debating the full support for Wayland in 3.12 for a while. They at one point even considered delaying the Gnome release to keep the development in sync with Wayland. Finally, developers have decided to keep Wayland in ‘preview’ mode as there is still a lot of work to be done.
Numix
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The Numix Project recently unveiled plans to release their own Operating System and Desktop Shell for the Linux kernel. Previously the project enjoyed success with their set of extensions for the Gnome 3 desktop. The custom desktop shell Numix has built and arranged is full of colorful and rich icons, something lacking from a default Gnome 3 instance. Collaboration with Nitrux S.A. is also in effect, propelling this interesting project forward in full force. There are some though who previously criticized the project as “yet another Gnome clone,” but it is yet to be seen the full extent of what this announcement will bring. Numix promises the unrevealed portions to be quite good, describing them as ”rad.” I must be getting old, but I digress. The desktop shell the project team is aiming for a professionally designed and clean look. Notable areas include an intellihide dock at the bottom, allowing dragging to other workspaces a breeze. Not much else is known at the moment, but updates should soon be revealed. I have doubts as to what else Numix will do to truly different itself from the pack, aside from clean looking text and icons. Regardless, I give them the benefit of the doubt until I see their final product. If the good looking mockups are any indication, we may very well see a fine looking end result.
Applications
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With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.12 there is a brand new user-interface for Gedit, GNOME's text editor.
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Epiphany 3.12 Beta 1 revamps the title/location bar, improves the HTML-based overview page, fixes some issues with pop-up windows in multi-process mode, moves the New Tab button to the left side of the navigation toolbar, and repairs the Find toolbar.
GTK
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GTK+ 3.11.7 has been released for this week's GNOME 3.12 Beta.
GTK+ 3.11.7 isn't too exciting with it already being late into the 3.12 release cycle, but on the Wayland front it makes use of the new xdg-shell ping and xfg-shell focus methods.
The listing of the GTK+ tool-kit changes for this new development release can be found via this Git tag.
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Kai Willadsen had the pleasure of announcing today, February 23, that the Meld visual diff and merge tool reached version 3.11.0, a release that includes many new features and improvements.
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CloudPrint is the Google web service for users to share their printers and having a "Print to File" menu item that is basically the same as "Save to Google Drive." This GTK+ CloudPrint support works with GNOME-Online-Accounts for gaining access to your Google account and is able to discover printers, obtain printer details, and submit print jobs.
Opinions
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Today's newsfeeds were bountiful indeed. Muktware is running a comparison of gaming option for us Linux users. The Register tested GNOME 3.12 and says it's looking sensible and sane. And Gary Newell has tried to answer the eternal question: "Is Linux right for me?" Today's post also includes several extras to keep you busy through the weekend too.
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