GNOME, like every weekend for about four years now, has published a new note with the latest developments from the last seven days. Among them, it tells us that Papers has become the project's official document viewer, effectively demoting Evince, which hasn't made much progress in recent years. The decision was made to offer a more modern alternative.
What follows is the list with the most outstanding news which took place in the week from June 27th to July 4th, including a new release of Phosh, the purest GNOME that can be used on mobile devices.
This week in GNOME.
- The release team announces that Papers will be the default document viewer starting with GNOME 49. This follows a massive effort by Papers maintainers and contributors that began about four years ago. Inclusion in GNOME Core was recently blocked solely by the lack of screen reader support, which is now ready to be integrated. Papers is a fork of Evince motivated by a faster development pace. Papers is not only a port to GTK 4, but also incorporates new features such as improved document annotations and support for mobile formats.
- While GdkPixbuf is being phased out in favor of better alternatives like Glycin, we're still working to keep it working properly while apps and libraries are migrated. Two weeks ago, GdkPixbuf added a secure, isolated image loader using Glycin; this week, it was updated to be the default on Linux. The Glycin loader has also been updated to read SVG and save image data, including metadata. Additionally, GdkPixbuf has a new native loader for Android, using the Android platform API; this allows icon resources to be loaded when compiling GTK for Android.
- The GNOME Flatpak nightly runtime and SDK org.gnome.Sdk//master are now based on the Freedesktop 25.08beta runtime and SDK.
- libadwaita finally has a replacement for the deprecated GtkShortcutsWindow: AdwShortcutsDialog. AdwShortcutLabel is also available as a standalone widget, replacing GtkShortcutLabel.
- There's been a lot of progress on accessibility in GNOME Calendar over the past few weeks; the next step is coming in GNOME 49.
- Event widgets and popovers will tell screen readers that they are toggle buttons. They will also indicate their states (whether they are pressed or not) and that they have a popover.
- Calendar rows will now indicate to screen readers that they are checkboxes, along with their status (whether they are checked or unchecked). Additionally, they will no longer require a second Tab keystroke to move to the next row; one will suffice.
- The month and year spin buttons can now be used with the up/down arrows. They will also indicate to screen readers that they are spin buttons, along with their properties (current, minimum, and maximum values). The month spin button will now loop; scrolling backward from January will move to December, and scrolling forward from December will move to January.
- Events in the agenda view will tell screen readers their titles and descriptions.
- We recently switched from the legacy GdkPixbuf image loading library to use Glycin internally, our new image loading library. Glycin is more secure, faster, and supports more features. Glycin now supports saving images in AVIF, BMP, DDS, Farbfeld, GIF, HEIC, ICO, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, QOI, TGA, TIFF, and WebP formats. JXL will be added soon. This means that GdkPixbuf can also save the formats it could before.
- Gradia has been updated with the ability to upload edited images to a chosen online provider. Care has been taken to ensure that users are well informed about these services and can choose freely without being forced to use a particular one. Data related to this feature can also be dynamically updated without the need for a new release, allowing data quality issues to be corrected and the list of providers to be updated without additional intervention from package maintainers.
- A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server implementation has been released that allows LLMs to interact with your favorite desktop environment.
- Phosh 0.48.0 is now available:
- There's a new lock screen add-on that displays all currently running media players (that support the MPRIS interface). This allows you to switch between Podcasts, Shortwave, and Gapless without having to unlock your phone.
- The phosh phoc compositor has also been updated to wlroots 0.19.0, incorporating all the improvements from that release. Phoc now also remembers the output scale in case autoscaling doesn't meet your expectations.
And this has been all this week in GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.