GNOME 3.34 Review - More performance, and quality of life improvements
1,483GNOME 3.34 packs a lot of new features and improvements, let's take a little tour !
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There have been a few improvements to GNOME Shell. First, GNOME 3.34 continues the latest tendency to optimize speed and performance. It will be subjective, and depend on your machine, but on mine, running fedora rawhide with the latest GNOME, I can say it's definitely smoother. Animations feel more responsive, and the activities overview does appear faster than on that same machine on manjaro GNOME running 3.32.
The most user facing feature, though, is the ability to reorganize apps into folders by simple drag and drop in the applications overview. It works just like on your smartphone: drag an app on top of another to create a folder. The folder has an automatic name based on shared categories between apps.
This is a much needed improvement, and should make using the app grid a lot easier for people allergic to keyboards !
In the Activities overlay, when showing all windows, the highlight over a specific windows also has been tweaked, and the shell's appearance has been tweaked a bit, with a darker background to make everything more legible.
To conclude, some more apps have migrated to the new GNOME icon guidelines, namely Photos, Videos, Todo, and Simple Scan, whose user facing name is now "Document Scanner".
The settings have been touched up a bit as well, with a brand new wallpaper panel. It now allows you to select an image outside of the "pictures" folder to be used as your wallpaper, and makes viewing all available wallpapers a lot easier.
While it's a good improvement, I also can't help but think that this should have been added a long time ago.
In the displays settings, night light now has its own tab, which is a good change, making things better organized.
The wifi panel also has better spacing, and will now show an status indicator when you're trying to connect to a wifi network.
GNOME shell search providers can also be reordered in the dedicated settings panel.
Nautilus, the file manager, will now show a warning dialog when a user tries to paste something in a read-only folder. This change makes it a lot more comprehensible to users.
GNOME Web, also called epiphany, now supports pinning tabs, for keeping a few webapps open at all times, and ships with a new emoji picker.
Pressing alt+enter when typing a URL will open it in a new tab, and hardware accelerated compositing can now be enabled in the settings, although it's off by default. When dragging and dropping tabs between windows, if a windows has no tabs left, it will now close automatically. The new tab page also has been redesigned, and sandboxing has been improved.
Epiphany's adblocker also has been improved, and is now based on webkit's content extensions.
GNOME Web is now a great and capable web browser that I use more and more each day. It's also the default on elementary OS, which should benefit from these improvements as well.
The terminal now supports right to left, and bidirectionnal languages, making it more accessible to everyone not using the western left to right text display.
GNOME Maps will now restore the last open position once you reopen it, as well as the map type you selected (aerial or street), which is nice, and uses a newer tile style.
It also is now able to open URLs directly in the app, and will now search as you type, and autocomplete in the search field. The fact that Maps can now open geo urls makes it a ton more useful !
GNOME Boxes has seen a bunch of improvements as well, including an improved virtual machine creation workflow, and the ability to boot from an ISO in an existing Virtual Machine. You can also enable 3D acceleration, or not, as an optional setting.
GNOME Music now watches for changes in the folders where its music are located, which is a must have feature for most people, and now supports gapless playback. The album, artist, and playlist views also have been revamped a bit.
GNOME Games now handles multiple save states for emulated games, allowing you to save as many snapshots of your gamie progress as you need, and supports Nintendo DS screen layouts.
To conclude, developers will be able to more accurately profile their various applications, to find bugs and optimize them, with the enhanced system profiler. It comes with a redesigned user interface, integrates with GTK and Mutter, and shows new data such as network usage, disk usage, and energy consumption.
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