GNOME 3.28 Has Been Released

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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TL;DR Features Below

  • New ‘Boxes’ Application Update - It’s Virtual Machine Software that now allows you to download Operating Systems straight from the Menu and it will automatically create a Virtual Machine for You.
  • New Favorites - Nautilus aka ‘Files’ now allows you to 'Favorite" folders and or files so they can be easliy accessed from a ‘Favorites’ Tab.
  • Desktop Icons Removed Permenantly. - You can no longer display icons on your desktop. you are forced to use Nautilus to access your files.
  • Calendar Application Update: Now Displays Weather on your events
  • Touch UI Keyboard Improvement - The Old Touch Keyboard built into GNOME has been updated to be more user friendly. the touch keyboard will now pop-up whenever you touch a “Text Box” on your system or browser.
  • New 'Usage" Application - A Beta Up-To-Date Version of System Monitor which will now display what uses the most resources / ram etc.
  • All Software UI has been Updated
  • Touchpads now use a gesture for Secondary Clicking by Default
  • Battery Levels of Bluetooth Devices Are Now Displayed by Default
  • Settings Application - Now Saves the most recent setting you were configuring when opened up.

Thoughts? the GNOME 3.28 update should be coming to your stable repos sometime within the week / month.

Citation: https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.28/

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Very nice. The updates look neat. It’ll be fun to play with and see how it performs.

This a bit odd but I understand why they are doing it. I personal don’t use icons on the desktop anyway.

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It’s not really been the default for quite some time. The option was just there. As the code was removed from nautilus the functionality is now gone. I agree with the dev it wasn’t the place for it either.

The functionality can be added as a plugin, but its never been as far as i’m aware, a core decision to ever have them in gnome 3.

Ill need to try this out soon. Ive been liking gnome, its improved release after release fairly consistently.

It has some issue it will need to address over the next year or so if its to work nicely on a phone. (some single thread issue or something like that holding it back performance wise)

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Neither do I. what’s funny is it’s always been disabled by default.

What’s going to Irritate me about this release is I’m probably not going to see it on Gentoo officially for a few months. unless I go get it from an unofficial repository.

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Gentoo usually have a staging repo you can use to test it out.

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I can’t use Gnome… I just can’t.
This no icons on the desktop thing is a good example why.

I’ll stick with KDE for a while I guess.

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that’s the thing. it rarely gets updated. I’ve always used Gentoo Unstable (for the most part it’s actually pretty stable) it’s still on 3.26.

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Checked out the layman repo? (assuming it still exists)

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yeah layman is still a thing. but it’s more of a Repository of Repositories. you add a repository and then it gets added to the Portage Tree.

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Now that’s cool. (or warm, depending on the weather, I guess)

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Seems like it’s 2 days ahead which is good. Also not only on events if we are looking from your picture.

Overall it’s good there are new things and it’s bad that they remove features. Why everything must be a plugin ?

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the KDE desktop is basically a plugin-desktop. everything can be removed and plugged into the task bar and desktop.

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I’d be interested to see how it handles events that are 40 miles away or so. Where I live, it could be 40 and raining in my town, but 10 miles away it could be 70 and sunny. I’d like to know that.

Reasons I like KDE, but don’t have the time to commit to moving over to it full-time.

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Yeah but it comes by default, and more plugins are added when they become stable. One of the small amount of reasons i dislike GNOME is because as they are going it feels like in a few years you will have only the desktop and everything will be a plugin you have to find on the internet.

That’s actually interesting.

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Mixed feelings about this.
A couple of the new features looks really promissing to me.

This sounds very handy and interesting.

Nice to see them paying some attention towards Nautilus,
Favorite files and folder tab is pretty handy.
They have stripped allot of nice feutures out of Nautilus over the years.
So its definitelly good to see some love towards it.

This is a littlebit of a dissapointment.
Allthough maybe its possible to enable this with Gnome tweak again?
As a desktop user i prefer to have an active desktop.
Allthough Gnome3 isnt really a active desktop like DE in the first place.
This also one of the main reasons why Gnome3 isnt really for me personally.

Thats great, hopefully we gonne see this resource monitor applications in other Gnome based DE´s.

Nice :slight_smile:

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I use Cinnamon for a lightweight DM, and KDE for the OCD level of customization. Cinnamon is what I give to people that have no experience with anything other than Windows.

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Yeah, that probably works. XFCE, MATE and LXDE should be ok too.

Absolutely! :+1:

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This is nice, touch keyboard was horribly unfriendly when working in browsers and most other applications.

They still need more settings for input like touchpads and mice. Ubuntu 18.04 has remedied some of this.

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I have the opposite problem: too much functionality. I don’t want gnome to do more things. Don’t start anything by default (well other than network related things because an offline computer is a paperweight in current year.
But other than that, let me disable everything or better yet disable everything by default. Say no to feature creep. Say no to all those factories or whatever. Who really uses the online accounts thingy anyways.

But I support the removal of desktop icons. Good riddance!

I cannot into KDE because the defaults are terrible. Single click to open in dolphin is just madness.

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