Notices by elementary (elementary@mastodon.social), page 2

Hey developers, need a little guidance when updating your app from @GTK 3 to 4? There’s a super comprehensive migration guide here: https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html

Terminal also gains the ability to both follow the system dark style preference as well as create custom color palettes. The new default light and dark styles are now fully opaque and have been updated to match the latest upstream values from the Solarized themes for improved legibility

We'd like to give a special thanks to our community for their continual commitment to making a great #OpenSource OS and our localization team that works hard to make every release available in dozens of languages. This release also wouldn’t have been possible without the work of developers running #Pantheon on other distros like @fedora and @nixos_org and their participation upstream. And we're always grateful for the work that goes into the @ubuntu releases that we build upon.

It’s been just over a year since we released elementary OS 6.1 Jólnir which brought new features and fixes based on your feedback, introduced new office productivity features, and expanded compatibility with a wide range of hardware. So far, OS 6.1 has been downloaded from our website over 400,000 times—150,000 times more than 6.0—and as always, that’s not including downloads from third parties or direct downloads via torrent that bypass our download page!

Code has also been the focus of responsiveness efforts and can now be tiled even on tiny notebook displays. The first changes you might notice are the full-height project sidebar and the new elementary light and dark styles for the source view. Code now also optionally follows the system-wide dark style preference. Both Find on Page and Find in Project now support regular expressions. Options for hiding and showing panels are now all present in a compact set of linked buttons in the app’s menu

There’s now also an Icon Browser app available in #AppCenter where you can see all of the icons shipped with the elementary platform. You can search or view icons by category as well as see what sizes and styles an icon comes in and even get a quick code snippet to use in your app.

Nearly all app icons have been redesigned to be based on a uniform tile shape with some elements overlaid or layered. The new design language for app icons feels more modern while still retaining the pixel-fitted charm you’re used to and allowing for playful expression. We hope this change in direction makes it simpler for app developers to create high quality app icons that feel like they fit in on elementary OS

We’ve added powerful features like the ability to set custom Terminal commands for each hotcorner and a redesign keyboard shortcuts settings makes it easier to disable shortcuts or revert them to defaults, as well as much better custom shortcut management. You can now also launch the Shortcuts app from the applications menu and we’ve added the option to open and close the Multitasking view using the Super key.

In elementary OS, settings are meant to make the operating system more #accessible to a wider range of people with various needs and ways of working. This release provides power profiles management, including a performance mode for devices that support it. Expect much improved battery life for mobile devices with Power Saver mode.

We’ve rewritten Music from scratch with a more focused design! It's better for folks who need a fast way to preview audio files, as well as for folks that carefully curate their own music collection and don’t want to compete with an app for control of their library. It also has better support for reading track metadata such as album art, works with system-wide media controls, and can be tiled and resized to fit small and large displays.

You can now choose to select folders with a single click instead of activating them in Files, Windows style. Quite a bit of work has gone into making sure multiple click modes are supported and working as expected. We’ve also spent extra attention dialing in the behavior of keyboard shortcuts, especially regarding copy/paste and selection shortcuts across different view modes and with different types of file selections.

Mail now sports a more-modern, flatter design as a first step towards work on making it more responsive. The unified inbox now supports #Microsoft365 accounts. Tasks now has offline support for newly created task lists and it makes sure to synchronize your remote lists when the network becomes available again. Plus it now sends notifications when a task is due

Onboarding includes a new view for configuring automatic updates, as well as the addition of a “Sunset to Sunrise” option for the dark style.

During Initial setup, we now detect if you use the right mouse button for clicking and offer to switch to a #LeftHanded mouse button order. There’s also a new view that will appear if your device doesn’t have network access instructing you how to get connected.

The ability to send feedback directly to developers, see development happen transparently, and receive fixes and new features as updates quickly is one of our greatest strengths over both proprietary platforms and traditional Linux distributions. The Feedback app is a critical component in beginning this loop, so this cycle we’ve brought some major improvements to it including instant launch times and you can now access the Feedback app directly from the applications menu

#Sideloading apps and using alt stores like #Flathub is a major feature of elementary OS and a competitive edge over closed platforms that only let you install apps from a locked down store. In this release we’ve made several improvements to smooth out the experience of using alt stores based on your feedback and the latest #CrossPlatform standards.

The biggest change you’ll notice when viewing app info pages is the improved emphasis on screenshots. Carousels now fill the width of the window, showing more screenshots at once. They can now also be accompanied by captions, which can help describe individual features as well as making pages more #accessible to folks with vision-related disabilities. And finally each screenshot now sits on a card that uses the app’s accent color, showing off more of the developer’s personality.

@FlatpakApps makes it simple for developers to publish app updates quickly and now you can get those updates automatically. If you’d still like to check for updates on your own, there’s now a handy menu option.

AppCenter now also installs OS updates offline. Packages are downloaded during your session and then quickly installed whenever you decide to restart, without forced or automatic shutdowns.

We’re shipping the very latest @gnome Web 43 which includes support for creating #WebApps which show in the applications menu. They can have their own settings including privacy controls and can even run in the background

The primary purpose of any operating system is to support the apps that you use to work, play, and express yourself creatively. In the latest version of AppCenter we’ve made app descriptions more engaging with more information, made it easier to update to the latest versions of apps, and improved support for sideloading and alt stores. We’ve also worked on responsiveness—making sure you can comfortably use it when tiling and on small displays as well as better using space on large displays.