This week, Canonical has confirmed that Ubuntu 25.10 will no longer offer the option to start X11 sessions by default.. Among the reasons we find that it is a fruitless effort, partly because GNOME was also planning to do the same. A few moments ago, they published the note with this week's desktop updates and have confirmed what we were all expecting: in GNOME 49, we will no longer find any sessions to run the environment in X.org.
What follows is the list with this week's news, what happened in the GNOME world from June 6th to June 13th.
This week in GNOME
- Core components of the GNOME desktop, such as GDM and gnome-session, are being actively modernized, which will increase GNOME's reliance on systemd. To ensure developers are aware of this change and have time to prepare, the GNOME Release Team has written a blog post explaining what is changing, why, and how to adapt.
- Glycin, the new GNOME image loading library already powered by the image viewer (Loupe), can now also power the legacy image loading library GdkPixbuf. This will significantly improve image handling security and provide more features in the future.
- Packet has received several updates since last time. Recent improvements include:
- Desktop notifications for incoming transfers.
- Ability to run in the background and start automatically upon login.
- Integration with Nautilus via a “Send with Packet” option in the context menu.
- Just after the initial release of Bouncer, a new version was released. This version includes a critical fix for users of languages other than English, where Bouncer failed to launch.
- Gradia has received a major overhaul this week, both in features and design:
- A new background image mode has been added, offering six presets to choose from, or you can use your own image.
- There's now a new solid-color background mode, which notably includes a fully transparent option. This allows you to ignore the background feature and use Gradia only for annotations.
- An automatic numbering tool has been introduced, useful for creating quick guides on an image.
- The application now finally saves the selected annotation tool and its options between sessions.
- This week, ALT Gnome and the ALT Linux team announced that Tuner is now available on Flathub. This process took longer than expected, as the Flathub team had concerns about the minimal functionality of the base Tuner app. As a result, the Flathub build of Tuner also includes the TunerTweaks module, which provides basic GNOME customization features across various distributions. New features are in development. They are actively working on expanding the plugins' functionality and adapting Tuner to various environments. Here are some features they are finalizing or developing and plan to include in future releases:
- The ability to manage installed add-ons directly from Tuner, such as hiding unused ones without uninstalling them and viewing information about their authors.
- Improved API for modules, which simplifies the creation of basic modules and allows for more extensible functionality (already used in the Flathub version and the TunerTweaks module).
- Support for complex page structures, allowing for more advanced modules with custom menus and submenus in the interface.
- Pipeline version 2.4.0 has been released, making it easier to organize videos. Adding filters to remove videos from the feed has been simplified, with a context menu added to videos to filter out similar videos. Depending on the author and video title, you'll be prompted to apply the filter to the video title. It's now also possible to hide previously viewed videos from the feed. History is stored locally, and its recording can be disabled.
- Shell extensions, EGO review guidelines for clipboard access have been updated.
And that's been it for this week at GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.