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Introducing GNOME 3.26: “Manchester”

GNOME 3.26 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 24105 changes, made by approximately 778 contributors.

3.26 has been named “Manchester” in recognition of this year’s GUADEC organizing team. GUADEC is GNOME’s primary annual conference and is only possible due to the amazing work of local volunteers. This year’s event was held in Manchester, UK, and was a big success. Thank you Team Manchester!

System search has been improved for GNOME 3.26. Results have an updated layout which makes them easier to read and shows more items at once. Additionally, it’s now possible to search for system actions, including power off, suspend, lock screen, log out, switch user and orientation lock. (Log out and switch user only appear if there’s more than one user. Orientation lock is only available if the device supports automatic screen rotation.)

These search features can be accessed in the usual way: click Activities and type into the search box, or simply press Super and start typing!

New Look Settings

GNOME 3.26 introduces a new layout to the Settings application. The previous grid of icons is gone and, in its place, a sidebar allows switching between different areas. The new sidebar makes it much easier and quicker to navigate the settings application and places the most commonly used settings within easy reach. It also means that the Settings window is now bigger and can be resized, which is more comfortable in a lot of situations.

GNOME’s network settings have been improved as part of this work: Wi-Fi now has its own dedicated settings area and network settings dialogs have been reworked, so that they are neater, clearer and easier to use.

Color Emoji! 👍💎🍩🐈

Color emoji have arrived in GNOME! These will now be displayed in their full-color glory wherever they appear. Various ways to insert emoji have also been introduced for GNOME 3.26. This includes the Characters application, which now allows you to browse and search for emoji and to copy them into messages and documents. Polari, the GNOME IRC client, has a dedicated emoji picker and a similar tool is being made available for other applications to use.

Synchronize Your Browser

In Web, the GNOME browser, it’s now possible to synchronize your bookmarks, passwords and browser history, using the Firefox Sync service. This makes it possible to keep an online backup of this information and also to share it with Firefox desktop and mobile.

Firefox Sync can be set up from Web’s application preferences.

Redesigned Display Settings

GNOME’s display settings have been redesigned for 3.26. The new design brings relevant settings to the forefront, so it’s easy to get an overview of how your displays are set up. When there are multiple displays connected, a simple row of buttons allows you to choose how you want to use them.

The new display settings include a preview version of a new scaling setting. This allows the size of what’s shown on the screen to be adjusted to match the density (often expressed as PPI or DPI) of your display, resulting in the right amount of content being displayed, as well as making it easy to read.

The display scaling feature is expected to mature in future releases. For the best experience, Wayland is recommended over X11, as per-display configuration is not supported on X11.

System Refinements

There have been a number of highly visible visual refinements for GNOME 3.26. These include:

And That’s Not All…

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

GNOME 3.26 no longer shows status icons in the bottom-left of the screen. This prevents the status icon tray from getting in the way and is expected to provide a better overall experience. The lack of status icons is not expected to cause serious issues for users. However, if you do find that you need to access them, they can be restored using the TopIcons extension. More information about this change can be found in a blog post on the subject.

More Information

GNOME 3.26 also has lots to offer developers, and is translated into many languages.

Getting GNOME 3.26

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 3.26 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 3.26 includes many new features and improvements for those working with GNOME technologies. Read on for more details!

Builder

Builder, the GNOME integrated development environment (IDE), has made major advances in 3.26, with general improvements as well as new features. One of the most obvious changes in the new version is a redesigned editor interface. This makes it easier to open and switch between files, terminals and documentation, using either the header popover or the project sidebar. There have been a lot of user interface refinements as part of this work, including document headers which blend into the background.

With 3.26 it’s now possible to search for symbols throughout your project. Selecting a search result jumps to that location, so you can quickly navigate using only the keyboard. The presentation of search results has also been improved.

Builder includes a debugging feature for the first time in 3.26. This is an initial preview and is expected to mature in subsequent releases. The debugger allows running your project in debug mode and to step through to find the source of issues. It supports debugging Flatpak applications.

Contextual documentation popovers are another new feature for this release. To quickly look up documentation for the code that you’re working on, just hover the pointer over the function that you’re interested in or place the text cursor within the function and press F2 (or Shift+K in Vim mode).

There are many other improvements in Builder 3.26. These are just some of them:

For more information about how to make the most of Builder, see the documentation (which has also been improved for 3.26!)

Flatpak

Flatpak is the new technology for distributing and installing applications. While it’s independent of the GNOME project, Flatpak is an increasingly important part of GNOME’s developer experience, and is integrated throughout GNOME.

Major improvements have been seen in Flatpak since GNOME 3.24. Most development has been seen on the 0.9.x branch, which is well on its way to a 1.0 release. Enhancements that have been introduced in the last six months include:

flatpak-builder, the tool for generating Flatpak applications, has been split out into its own module and has had a lot of improvements. These include:

More details can be found in the various Flatpak release notes.

Other Improvements

Other improvements in GNOME 3.26 include:

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.26 offers support for more than 36 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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