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Here’s What Devs Are Planning for GNOME 43
There are exciting development plans for GNOME 43 and beyond, here’s what you can expect….
It hasn’t been that long since GNOME 42 was released.
While it was an exciting upgrade over GNOME 41, you may not be able to find it on every
mainstream Linux distribution (except OpenSUSE, Arch, and Clear Linux).
Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 should be the most popular options featuring GNOME 42 with their
releases in the following weeks.
What’s next?
GNOME 43, yes.
GNOME 43: Planned New Features In a blog post, a GNOME developer (Chris Davis)
shared some improvements/changes planned for GNOME 43 and beyond.
Let me highlight some major highlights of it.
Global Accent Colors
With the introduction of Libadwaita, it is now possible to add a feature for global accent
colors.
You do not have to depend on the distribution to provide the ability to use accent colors
(just like one added to Ubuntu 22.04).
The GNOME desktop experience can be more personalized with the accent colors.
Moreover, it will not be limited just presets, but customizable accent colors, which will
be opt-in for app developers.
Recoloring API
While this is not particularly interesting for the end-users, it will help app developers
offer preset color schemes and let their app blend in better with various accent colors.
As per the blog post:
Developers using the recoloring API will be able to programmatically change colors in
their apps and have dependent colors update automatically.
They’ll be able to easily create presets which can be used, for example, to recolor
the window based on a text view’s color scheme.
This is technically already possible with CSS in libadwaita 1.0.
However, the API should make things easier to implement.
Adaptive Nautilus File Manager
The Nautius file manager will receive some upgrades like adaptive design for mobile form
factor with a new file chooser mode within it.
It will help the GNOME platform keep up with new features without relying on GTK’s file
chooser, which does not support all GNOME feature like starred files.
New Image Viewer (Loupe) + Screenshot Annotation A new image viewer, a.k.a.
Loupe is in development, written in Rust using GTK4 and libadwaita.
The image viewer is aimed to be adaptive, touchpad and touchscreen friendly, and easy
to use.
You can expect it to be integrated with Nautilus to follow sorting settings for any folder
in the file manager.
In addition to the integration, the new image viewer will also receive some feature upgrades
in the form of basic image editing capabilities like cropping, rotation, and annotations.
With the annotations’ capability, it must work well with the screenshot flow, allowing
you to take screenshots and annotate them without any third-party programs.
New Design for Disk Usage Analyser (Rewritten in Rust)
The Disk Usage Analyzer is currently written in Vala.
While it does the work expected, it does not have a lot of potential with the way it is
now.
So, the development plans include rewriting it using Rust, which should improve it for
the foreseeable future, providing the best performance.
Not just limited to its core, it will also receive a design overhaul (similar to the
mockups above) in a bid to modernize the user experience.
Other Improvements As development progresses, we should hear
more about the planned changes to the GNOME shell and more.
I will be updating this article with more GNOME 43 features as we learn more about it.
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