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Introducing GNOME 3.24: Portland

GNOME 3.24 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 28459 changes, made by approximately 753 contributors.

3.24 has been named “Portland” in recognition of last year’s LAS GNOME Summit, which was held in Portland, Oregon. GNOME’s events are only possible due to the amazing work of local volunteers. This new event was the first of its kind, and brought together community members and partners on the US West Coast. Thank you, team LAS!

Sleep Easier with Night Light

Night Light is a new feature that changes the color of your displays according to the time of day. By making the screen color warmer in the evening, it can help to prevent sleeplessness and eye strain.

The new feature can be enabled from the display settings. The screen color follows the sunrise/sunset times for your location, but it can also be set to a custom schedule. The top bar shows when the feature is active, and the system menu allows it to be temporarily disabled.

Night Light works with both X11 and Wayland.

Revamped Settings

Three areas of the Settings application have seen design updates for GNOME 3.24. This includes Online Accounts, Printers and Users. In each case, the user interface has been refined and improved, without reducing existing functionality.

The printer settings now give a better overview at a glance, showing the location and ink level of each of your printers without have to do any digging. Online accounts has a cleaner layout and does a better job of showing which accounts are available to set up. Users has a new “carousel” switcher and an overall better layout.

These changes are part of a long-term project to update the Settings application, which are planned to lead to bigger improvements in the future.

New Recipes Application

Recipes is a brand new application for GNOME. Intended as a community project, the application contains a collection of recipes contributed by GNOME community members. Recipes already has an extensive feature set, including:

If you would like to contribute a recipe of your own, see the contribution guide.

Enhanced Notifications Area

The notification area has received a round of improvements for 3.24. The notifications list has a simpler, clearer layout, which makes it easier to read previous notifications. A number of other notifications bugs have also been fixed as a part of this effort, in order to provide a smoother notifications experience.

Weather information has also been integrated into the notifications area. This shows a simple summary of the day’s forecast, for the location that is set in the Weather application (this can either follow your current location, or be set to a manual location).

Improved Web Browser

Web, the GNOME browser, has had numerous improvements for GNOME 3.24. A number of significant design improvements make the application easier to use: a new address bar resolves a number of usability issues in the previous design, and a new popover shows a list of open tabs, making it easier to navigate when you have a large number of pages open.

Bookmarking has also been overhauled, with a new, simple, one-click interface for bookmarking pages, a bookmarks popover for quickly accessing your bookmarks, and a new interface for easily organizing your bookmarks.

3.24 also includes a number of privacy enhancements:

Finally, the latest version of Web has improved detection of forms, allowing passwords to be saved on more websites.

A Better View of Your Photos

Photos now provides a much better overview of your images. Thumbnails are bigger and resize to fill all the available space. They have also been improved to be higher quality and always be up to date.

Other improvements include:

Enhanced IRC Client

Polari, GNOME’s IRC client, includes a collection of improvements for 3.24. Clicking on a user name now shows a helpful popover which allows you to start a private conversation or request a notification when an offline user comes back online.

Other improvements include the option to have the application continue to run in the background without an open window, spell checking, and a list of available rooms in the join room dialog.

Play More Games

Games is a personal gaming center: a single place to browse and play your video games library. It allows you to play a variety of retro games, including:

Games has had a lot of interface improvements for 3.24, such as improved feedback when loading games, better window handling, and more helpful error messages. It has also gained the ability to play Libretro games.

Bigger, Brighter Icons

GNOME’s high resolution icons got even bigger for 3.24, doubling in size from 256×256px to 512×512px. This means that these icons are more detailed on high density displays.

The visual style of many of the device, file type and application icons has also been improved, with a new more streamlined look. Extraneous bevels and shading have been removed and the overall brightness has been increased, resulting in a more engaging appearance. All the document and folder icons have been updated along with many application icons.

Wacom Graphics Improvements

GNOME’s Wacom graphics tablet support has seen major improvements for 3.24. Significantly, Wacom settings and tablet handling are now compatible with Wayland, meaning that Wacom users no longer have an excuse not to switch from X11.

Stylus configuration has also been improved: styli can now be configured independently, allowing you to move them between tablets and keep the same configuration. Styli can also be configured using presets for different devices.

Finally, applications can now define the actions of tablet actions. These application defined actions are displayed in Wacom full screen overlays.

And That’s Not All…

As usual, there are also many other smaller improvements in this GNOME release. Here are some of them!

More Information

GNOME 3.24 also has lots to offer developers, and is translated into many languages.

Getting GNOME 3.24

GNOME’s software is Free Software: all our code is available for download and can be freely modified and redistributed. To install it, we recommend that you wait for the official packages provided by your vendor or distribution. Popular distributions will make GNOME 3.24 available very soon, and some already have development versions that include the new GNOME release.

About GNOME

The GNOME Project is an international community supported by a non-profit Foundation. We focus on user experience excellence and first-class internationalization and accessibility. GNOME is a free and open project: if you want to join us, you can.

Developer Information

GNOME 3.24 includes many new features and improvements for those working with GNOME technologies. Read on for more details!

Builder

Builder has made significant progress for 3.24, with a number of major new features. This includes enhanced support for a range of build systems, including Flatpak, CMake, Meson and Rust. This has been enabled by a new build pipeline architecture, which allows different build systems to be more easily supported.

Clicking a few buttons is all it takes to set up a development environment in 3.24, thanks to the ability to install and update SDKs and toolchains directly from Builder (either for Flatpak or Rust).

Valgrind integration makes it easy to profile your project. If Valgrind is available (as it always is with a Flatpak SDK), it is available from the run menu — just select it to run your project with it.

Flatpak support has had a significant amount of polish since last release, making it far more reliable and thoroughly integrated. This means it is now possible to seamlessly clone and build many GNOME applications using Flatpak, all from within Builder. This is a major step forward for the GNOME developer experience, and avoids the need to build a fragile dependency chain in order to contribute.

Flatpak

While Flatpak is independent of the GNOME project, GNOME is actively promoting its use as a part of its developer experience. Since the 3.22 release, Flatpak has made significant progress. There have been a total of eight Flatpak releases since then, which have introduced a host of major new features and improvements.

In addition, there has been a great many smaller improvements and bug fixes. The Flatpak releases page provides more details.

Progress Towards GTK+ 4

GTK+ development has been focused on the next major GTK+ release, GTK+ 4. This development branch is not currently ready for use. However, new features have started to land, including a recorder feature in GTK+ Inspector and support for the CSS filter specification. Other changes include cleanup of deprecated APIs and the creation of a new Vulkan renderer.

The stable 3.22 branch has continued to receive bug fixes this development cycle. These can be found in the GTK+ 3.22.10 release, which forms part of GNOME 3.24.

Other Changes

Other changes for developers in GNOME 3.24 include:

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.24 offers support for more than 39 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated. User documentation is also available in many languages.

Numerous other languages are partially supported, with more than half of their strings translated.

Detailed statistics and more information are all available on GNOME’s translation status site. You can also find out how to help translate GNOME.

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