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Introducing GNOME 3.38: “Orbis”

GNOME 3.38 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 27896 changes, made by approximately 901 contributors.

3.38 has been named “Orbis” in recognition of the team behind GUADEC 2020. GUADEC is GNOME’s annual conference, which is only possible thanks to the hard work of many volunteers. This year’s event was meant to be held in Zacatecas, Mexico, but had to be moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are very much looking forward to meeting in Mexico in the near future.

Drag to Reorder Apps

GNOME 3.38 replaces the previously split Frequent and All apps views with a single customizable and consistent view that allows you to reorder apps and organize them into custom folders. Simply click and drag to move apps around.

New Welcome Tour

GNOME 3.38 comes with Tour, shown at first login, after the initial setup. It primarily highlights the main functionality of the desktop, giving first time users a nice welcome to GNOME.

Welcome tour

Tour is written in Rust.

Settings

Settings can now manage parental controls for Standard user accounts through the new Parental Controls option in the Users section. Installed applications can be filtered from the application overview, preventing them from being launched by the managed user. Parental Controls also integrates with existing Software application restrictions, allowing you to select which applications can be installed.

Other improvements to Settings include a new fingerprint enrollment interface for devices with fingerprint readers, protection from unauthorized USB devices when the screen is locked, and an option to show battery percentage indicator in the system menu.

Improved Screen Recording

Under the covers, the screen recording infrastructure in GNOME Shell has been improved to take advantage of PipeWire and kernel APIs to reduce resource consumption and improve responsiveness.

Better Multi-Monitor Support

GNOME Shell can now drive multiple monitors with different refresh rates, making sure that you get the best possible experience out of your desktop. This improvement is only available in Wayland sessions.

A Better Browsing Experience

GNOME Web now features Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a collection of advanced mitigations designed to protect users from cross-site tracking. Learn more about Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which is enabled by default. In addition, the privacy settings now allow blocking websites from storing any local data in your browser.

GNOME Web

Web has received a number of other improvements this cycle, including new support for importing passwords and bookmarks from Google Chrome, a redesigned password manager, the ability to mute or unmute individual tabs, and redesigned preferences and history dialogs. To reduce annoyance, videos that play sound are now blocked from automatically playing by default, and new permissions allow controlling video autoplay policy for each website you visit.

Maps

Maps has received initial work making the app adaptive for phone use. In addition, it is now possible to display labels in satellite view, and to switch Maps to night mode to emphasize the visual content of the maps.

GNOME Maps

Clocks

The “Add World Clock” dialog has been redesigned. Additionally, it is now possible to set a snooze and ring duration for alarms.

GNOME Clocks

Games

Games collections

Games has received some performance improvements this release. Search results now show up in the overview search interface, making it faster than ever to start playing your favorite game. With support for collections, you can organize games into groups for easy access or simply use the built-in Favorites and Recent collections. Games now supports Nintendo 64 games as a result of some improvements to libretro. Finally, Games is more stable now, running games in a secondary process. If a game or emulator crashes now, the main application won’t.

Utilities

Screenshot and Sound Recorder have been redesigned to provide a more polished and elegant experience.

Screenshot and Sound Recorder

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

Getting GNOME 3.38

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 3.38 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 3.38 includes many new features and improvements for those working with GNOME technologies. Read on for more details!

Boxes

Boxes is GNOME’s application for managing virtual machines and remote desktop connections. When creating a new virtual machine, Boxes now allows users to manually select the operating system if it fails to detect it automatically, rather than falling back to the default “Unknown” virtual machine profile. This improves support for operating systems that are incompatible with the default profile.

GNOME Boxes XML editor

Boxes now allows editing a virtual machine’s libvirt XML, enabling you to change advanced settings that are not available in the user interface.

GNOME OS

GNOME OS is a virtual machine image designed to facilitate development and testing of GNOME. It is not intended to replace traditional Linux distributions. Try out GNOME OS for yourself. Due to recent changes in Boxes’s support for UEFI, you must use Boxes 3.38 to run GNOME OS images; older versions of Boxes will not work.

GNOME OS Welcome

libhandy

libhandy is a library providing high-quality GTK widgets with a focus on adaptive and mobile-friendly user interfaces. GNOME 3.38 includes libhandy 1.0, which brings many new widgets, such as HdyDeck and HdyWindow. The libhandy 1.0 release is parallel-installable with the earlier libhandy 0.0 API series.

Tracker

Tracker has a new website and greatly improved documentation. With version 3.0, tracker has moved from a centralized to distributed database model. App developers are encouraged to store data in app-local Tracker databases.

The file system indexed managed by Tracker Miner FS is now read-only.

Tracker’s SPARQL core now fully supports SPARQL 1.1 query language, including the SERVICE {} statement, which allows one database to query from another.

The tracker3 commandline tool has also seen many improvements.

GJS

GJS has been updated to use Spidermonkey version 78. This brings a number of new language features, such as the ?? operator (“nullish coalescing operator”) and the ?. operator (“optional chaining operator”), public static class fields, support for separators in numeric literals (like 1_000_000), a more powerful regular expression engine with lookbehind and named capture groups, and useful methods such as String.replaceAll() and Intl.RelativeTimeFormat.formatToParts().

Other Improvements

Other improvements in GNOME 3.38 include:

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.38 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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