The release of GNOME 42 brings new features, UI tweaks, and performance improvements, and GNOME developer CHRIS DAVIS blogged about the development plans for GNOME 43 and beyond. The new version focuses on the following changes:
Accent Color and Libadwaita Recolor API
GNOME 41 introduces the libadwaita library to help define the visual language and user experience of GNOME applications, making it easy to implement an important personalization feature: customizable accent colors.
CHRIS DAVIS plans to submit a proposal to the xdg-desktop-portal in the near future. In GNOME, it's better to just show some QA-tested accent colors in the UI, but libadwaita will support configuring arbitrary colors.
Developers using the recoloring API can programmatically change colors in their applications and automatically update the associated colors. Technically, while CSS is already available in libadwaita 1.0, this API makes it simpler, developers don't have to think about every color scheme, just set a subset of colors, and libadwaita will properly sync the rest. This change makes applications from KDE, GNOME, elementary OS, etc. all use the same color if preference is supported.
Adaptive Nautilus and file picker improvements
Currently there are some issues with the GTK file picker. For example, it doesn't support GNOME features like asterisk files and needs to be patched by downstream vendors (eg PureOS, Mobian) to work on mobile devices. In order to keep up with platform conventions, the file selector should ideally be part of GNOME core, not GTK.
With all of this in mind, CHRIS DAVIS plans to adapt Nautilus to the mobile form factor and add a new file picker mode to it. The file selector in Nautilus instead of GTK enables developers to support GNOME platform features at the speed of GNOME instead of GTK, follow GNOME design patterns, and implement features such as grid views with thumbnails.
Magnifying glass (image viewer)
Loupe is a new image viewer written in Rust using GTK4 and libadwaita. The current plan is to make Loupe a responsive, touchpad and touchscreen friendly and easy-to-use product, and also to integrate with Nautilus so that Loupe follows the sorting settings of folders in Nautilus.
In the long run, Loupe should also get simple image editing features, namely cropping, rotation, and annotation. With annotations, Loupe can be integrated with the new screenshot feature, allowing users to take screenshots and annotate them without any additional procedures.
Rewriting Baobab in Rust
Baobab (aka Disk Usage Analyzer) is written in Vala. However, Vala does not have a robust library ecosystem, and the tool leaves some to be desired. But Rust has a thriving library ecosystem and great tooling, also has great GTK bindings, and is constantly improving. By rewriting Baobab in Rust, it will be able to take full advantage of the ecosystem while improving the performance of its main function: analyzing disk usage.
In addition to the rewrite, a redesign of the tool is planned, and the new design will modernize the UI.
Open adjacent files from the FileChooser portal
When selecting a file, the xdg-desktop-portal file selector does not allow adjacent files to be opened. If you're using a web browser as a flatpak, you might run into this problem: opening an html file doesn't load the associated HTML file or media file. If you are working on a website locally, you need to serve it with a web server in order to preview it.
The current plan is to allow developers to request access to adjacent files when a file is opened through the FileChooser portal, Loupe can be released as a flatpak, and applications like Lutris or Bottles can also be used as a flatpak.
accessibility fixes
GTK4 makes accessibility very easy, but there is still room for improvement in making core applications accessible. The current plan is to go through the core application set, test it with the helper tools available, and log and fix any issues that arise.
More on the CHRIS DAVIS blog .