22. September 2024 Ephraim Reading time: 3 minutes
GNOME: The GNOME developers released the latest version of their desktop on Wednesday. The probably “biggest” feature is the accent colors, which can now be set. Furthermore, scaling on low-resolution screens has been improved and hardware encoding has been added when recording the screen on AMD and Intel systems. GTK now uses Vulkan by default for rendering and the sidebar of the file manager has been slightly restructured and improved. Furthermore, Files is now also used as a “file open” dialog. This means that you have all the features you normally have at your fingertips.
Fedora: The beta version of Fedora 41 was released on Tuesday of this week. The new version brings many improvements, including the proprietary Nvidia driver can now be used with Secure Boot, the DNF package manager has been upgraded to version 5, there is a KDE Plasma Mobile and a Miracle Spin, and LXQt has been updated to version 2.0. In addition to all these changes, the majority of the package base has also been updated.
Ubuntu: The beta version of Ubuntu 24.10 was also released this week. The GNOME desktop was upgraded to version 47 and the new Thunderbird version (128) is already included. Otherwise, I didn’t find anything particularly exciting, the official Releasenotes but still show many small changes.
Element: The Element developers have in a Blogpost announced that the Element X app is ready for production. The app (on Android and IOS) has been rewritten from scratch with Rust and uses the Matrix 2.0 protocol. Synchronization in particular has been significantly improved and is clearly faster than in the old app. The new “Element Call” is also delivered with the app, which integrates much better into the messenger than the previous Jitsi. The end-to-end encryption is also said to have been improved, so that problems with it should be a thing of the past.
I find the decision to advertise Element X as ready a bit strange. After all, many important functions are still missing compared to the old app. But as a “normal messenger app” it has all the functions.
Sources:
https://release.gnome.org/47/
https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-41-beta/
https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-server-suite-are-ready/
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/oracular-oriole-release-notes/44878
https://unsplash.com/photos/white-printer-paperr-FoKO4DpXamQ
