GNOME 3.32 - New Features, New Adwaita theme...
1,684The time has come for a new GNOME version: version 3.32 is out after 6 months of development, and it will be the base for most user-facing distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and many others. Let's see what this one brings !
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Gnome JS, the engine behing the Shell, has had many improvements, which bring performance fixes, and better reactivity. This work had already had noticeable results in 3.30, but in 3.32 , they took it further. I can safely say this is the most responsive GNOME Shell has been, and this should put to rest most of the complaints people had about the animation framerate and performance.
The AppMenu usually located on the top panel of the shell is deprecated, and more and more applications are migrating this menu inside the window. This is change I'm not particularly fond of, for two main reasons: on most apps, that menu is now located on the app's icon, in the headerbar, which looks odd to me. Second, since Adwaita does not make it really clear which window is currently in focus with its grey titlebars, the appmenu served as a clear indicator of that, and that's now gone.
This brings us nicely to the next new feature: a new Adwaita Theme and icons. This has been in the making for along time, and should really bring GNOME a fresh new coat of paint. Adwaita has been made more legible, with more subtle buttons and tabs outlines, smoother drop shadows, and generally a less heavy feel. On/Off switches also have been redesigned to look a bit more round and in keeping with the rest of the theme.
This new Adwaita theme won't blow your mind if you already liked Adwaita, and chances are, if you replaced it with someting else, these changes won't be enough to make you go back to it, but at least the first contact users will have with GNOME will be a more pleasing one, in my opinion.
Icons also have seen a big redesign. Gone are the 3D shapes of old. They were a pain to create, looked out of place next to third party icons, and didn't scale well to smaller icon sizes, so they've been replaced by geometrical shapes, based on rectangles, circles, and squares.
GNOME applications also have been updated to include a few new features. GNOME Web, also called Epiphany, has received a new setting to control hardware acceleration.
It also has been touched up on some design details, such as the security popover, which looks more modern, a few improvements to the tab menu which displays favicons and allows to close tabs, and some scaling improvements when the browser is run on small form factors.
GNOME Software now has more information about Flatpaks : it will show the permissions you'll grant to the program when you install it, and when you update it as well. These permissions are separated in two: the built in permissions that can't be modified, and the additional permissions that the user can tweak. This should allow users to be more conscious about which features each program will have access to, and is a good step in securing the installation of Flatpaks.
GNOME Builder is probably the best IDE to develop GTK apps, and has received a ton of improvements. It now supports command line arguments, such as a git clone command, it allows developers to specify an application ID during project creation, the main top bar can now cycle through notifications, and the command bar is now placed in a more visible position, instead of the bottom of the screen.
Builder now has a "project-less" mode to open individual files, with a simplified UI, and added support for multi-monitor setups: it's now possible to open a new workspace window and place it on another display. Finally, Basic GLADE integration is now possible for quickly designing a user interface.
Settings
A few settings have been added or tweaked, most notably the sound settings, which are more legible and better laid out.
You can now change the color temperature in Night Light, to go more towards blue / red light, and the input sources can now be rearranged via drag and drop in the region and language settings.
Each flatpak app also now have a dedicated panel in the GNOME Settings, to control its permissions after installation, as well as settings for notifications, sound, and search, and the total space the application uses on disk. Non-Flatpak applications don't have the permission settings, but still benefit from a dedicated panel for all other options.
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