What's New in elementary OS in October ?
778elementary OS has released a bunch of updates in October, and I think they're worth a look, so here is what has changed, and there are some big changes!
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elementary OS blog post: https://blog.elementary.io/updates-for-october-2019/
AppCenter
The AppCenter has received a lot of love this month. First of all, it's now up to 10 times faster to load the recommended suggestions and the homepage, which is always welcome. The speed improvement is really noticeable !
But the main feature is still flatpak support: that's right, elementary's AppCenter has added the first brick to support this more recent format. It doesn't ship with flathub by default, but if you add a flatpak to your system, and it adds its own remote, you'll be able to select, directly in the AppCenter, which app you want to install: the one from the repos, or the one from flatpak.
TO add these individual flatpak files, you now have the sideload app, which is not installed by default, but you can install it with
sudo apt install io.elementary.sideload
It allows you to open individual flatpakref files and install the app and their remote server to keep them up to date through the AppCenter. They'll warn you that the app is not curated by the elementary OS team, and this warning is now displayed on all apps coming from the standard Ubuntu repos as well.
Finally, you can also browse and remove apps while offline.
These changes make elementary OS a lot more flexible if you want to use flatpak apps, and since these correct the fact that elementary is based on an LTS version of Ubuntu, without the latest versions of popular apps, it really makes a huge difference.
**Other changes**
Apart from the AppCenter, a lot of other nice design touches have been implemented:
First, the date and time indicator is now split in two, one for the calendar, and the other for the appointments you have for the selected day. It's a handy little change that will save some time when you need to see what's ahead on your schedule.
In the settings, the Housekeeping tab has been redesigned to better match the welcome screen, with a nicer layout.
The pairing agent for Bluetooth devices has been reworked as well, and now display pairing codes for peripherals that need them, so elementary should now support a wider range of devices by default.
The new beautiful greeter, and the panel have received bugfixes and polish, and drop shadows and the general theme have been modified to look more consistent, especially with older GTK2 applications, and electron apps.
All these updates should already be available in the AppCenter right now, and they really make a big difference to how one might use elementary OS.
You can read more details on the dedicated blog post from the elementary team, I left a link in the description of the video.