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Introducing GNOME 3.34: “Thessaloniki”

GNOME 3.34 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 23929 changes, made by approximately 777 contributors.

3.34 has been named “Thessaloniki” 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 Thessaloniki, Greece, and was a big success. Thank you, Team Thessaloniki!

Custom Icon Folders

In GNOME 3.34, icons in the application overview can be grouped together into folders. Drag an icon on top of another to create a group. Removing all icons from a group will automatically remove the group too. This makes organizing applications much easier and keeps the application overview clutter-free.

The overview visual style was refined as well, including the search entry field, the login password field and the overview window highlight border. All these changes give the GNOME desktop an improved overall experience.

A Better Browsing Experience

In Web, the GNOME web browser, web processes are now sandboxed. This restriction limits web process access to only locations necessary to run a web browser.

This release also introduces tab pinning. Favorite tabs can be “pinned”, saving them in the tab list and persisting them across sessions.

The ad blocking feature has been updated to use WebKit content filters. This results in a large performance improvement over the previous ad block implementation.

An Improved Box Workflow

Boxes, the GNOME virtual and remote machine manager, received a number of improvements this release as well.

The New Box Assistant workflow has been improved to be more intuitive. Separate dialogs are used when adding a remote connection or external broker. When creating a new local virtual machine, the source selection is split into three sections: Detected Sources, Featured Downloads, and Select a Source.

The Windows Express Install now uses a CD-ROM ISO image instead of a 1.44″ floppy disk image. This drops legacy dependencies and sets up Express Install support for versions.

Existing virtual machines can now explicitly be booted from an attached CD/DVD image. This enables users to rescue a broken system or simulate dual-booting environments.

On machines that support it, 3D acceleration is now an optional setting in the machine properties. This enables users to opt out of 3D acceleration whenever they want, or enable it only when necessary.

Save Game States

Games, the GNOME retro gaming application, now supports multiple save states per game. You can now save as many game state snapshots as you want. Save states can be exported as well, allowing you to share them or move them between devices.

Background Previews

A redesigned Background panel landed in Settings. The new panel shows a preview of the selected background in use under the desktop panel and lock screen. Custom backgrounds can now be added via the Add Picture… button.

Music Updates

Music now watches tracked sources (such as the Music folder in your Home directory) for new or changed files and will update automatically.

A major rewrite of the core components landed this release cycle, resulting in, among other things, gapless playback. Many albums are intended to be listened to as a whole and splitting it up into tracks breaks that playback. Gapless playback now enables those albums to be listened to as they were meant to be heard.

And finally, the album, artist and playlist views have been updated with a more refined layout.

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

Getting GNOME 3.34

GNOME’s software is Free Software: all our code is available for download and can be freely modified and redistributed according to the respective licenses. To install it, we recommend that you wait for the official packages provided by your vendor or distribution. Popular distributions will make GNOME 3.34 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 3.34 includes many new features and improvements for those working with GNOME technologies. Read on for more details!

Flatpak

Flatpak is a cross-distribution, cross-desktop technology for application building and distribution. While it is separate from the GNOME project, Flatpak is central to GNOME’s developer experience plans.

During this release cycle, the Flatpak team released a new stable series: 1.4.x. This introduced an improved system-wide installation mechanism, resulting in better I/O performance and a more secure installation process.

Additionally, preconfigured remotes now use regular .flatpakrepo files instead of custom .conf files. This streamlines the process for preconfigured remotes; they are now identical to manually added remotes.

Flathub, a Flatpak application distribution service, is growing steadily. It now hosts over 600 applications.

Builder

Builder, a GNOME IDE, continues to add new features. This release, it gained a number of useful features.

The development environment now features an integrated D-Bus inspector. This inspector can be opened via the Switch Surface button (in the top left corner of the project window).

Builder can run a program in a container via podman as long as podman supports the --preserve-fds exec flag. The program can be debugged if the container includes gdb.

Git integration has been moved to an out-of-process gnome-builder-git daemon. The daemon can be communicated with via D-Bus and will soon support operations like pushing, staging and committing.

Sysprof

Sysprof, the GNOME instrumenting and system profiling utility, saw significant development this release. In order to streamline and simplify the performance profiling process for developers, Sysprof has been integrated with a number of core platform libraries, including GJS, GTK, and Mutter.

More data sources have been added too, including an energy usage monitor. Finally, the UI was redesigned to improve the profiling workflow.

Icon Library

Two new applications to help developers with icons have been released.

Icon Library can be used to browse and search for symbolic icons. Icon Preview assists designers and developers in creating and testing new application icons under different visual styles. Both applications can be installed as Flatpaks and are hosted on Flathub.

Pango

The Pango font rendering library introduced a few new features that make rendering text easier.

Developers now have more advanced control over their text rendering options. Automatic hyphenation, line-spacing and subpixel positioning can be enabled or disabled as desired. Rendering spaces and other “invisible” characters can be enabled as well. And finally, direct access to the underlying hb_font_t is available by calling pango_font_get_hb_font.

Other Improvements

Other improvements in GNOME 3.34 include:

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.34 offers support for more than 34 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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