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This month the biggest story is System Settings, but we also have some great progress on the new Dock and Wayland. Plus a small change to default keyboard shortcuts that you might appreciate. Read ahead to find out the new developments you have to look forward to in the upcoming elementary OS 8! System Settings The System Settings port for GTK 4 is now completed! And not only that, we’ve landed the first step in a major redesign. Settings panes are now in charge of drawing their own window controls, which means several settings have already been updated to use a more modern paned design and others are able to use space more efficiently in their own way. You can expect further design refinements to continue to land throughout the OS 8.x cycle System Settings has a new modern design The headliner this month is definitely Application settings. We now have support for adjusting the runtime permissions stored in Flatpak’s PermissionsStore—these are set when an app explicitly asks for your...
a year ago

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Developer Tools, Hardware Enablement, and Multitasking Futures

Your monthly updates post is here! This month we have a couple of releases for our developer tools, plus plenty of improvements to Bluetooth, as well as a hardware enablement boost from Ubuntu and plenty to talk about in Early Access. Let’s dive in! System Settings The previously mentioned redesign of Bluetooth Settings has arrived! This redesign not only brings a bit more visual separation between paired devices and nearby devices, but also improves the keyboard navigation and screen reader experience. Plus, you can now double click rows to activate them. We resolved an issue where sometimes devices would be duplicated in the list and fixed issues when a pairing request requires entering passcodes—like with some keyboards. You’ll now also see fewer unnamed devices when discovering, enabling and disabling Bluetooth on devices that have been hardware locked should now work reliably, and to top it all off performance when listing lots of devices has also been improved. Bluetooth settings has a new design Leonhard and Ryo fixed a couple of issues with sidebar selections when navigating directly to a setting from search. Ryo fixed an issue where Sharing Settings lost its window controls when a network was not connected. And there’s now an action to jump directly to the System Updates page from the context menu in the Dock or Applications Menu or via search. Code Working with Git projects continues to get better thanks to Jeremy! There’s now a new feature to clone git repositories directly from inside Code via the projects menu in the sidebar. The item for opening project folders has moved there as well, so managing your open projects now happens all in one place no matter where they come from. You can now clone Git projects in Code He also fixed an issue with blank tooltips appearing in empty sidebar folders, a crash when deleting selected text while using the “Highlight Selection” plugin, and a freeze when editing lists with the “Markdown” plugin. Plus, the Symbols sidebar now shows a loading spinner when searching symbols takes longer than usual, and filters have been fixed for C symbols. Terminal Terminal will now warn about pasted commands that include options to skip confirmation like -y, --interactive=never, and --force. Plus we now make sure to show all found warnings about a pasted command, not just the first one found. For example, if a command like sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y fuse is pasted, we will warn about use of admin privileges, multiple commands, and that it skips confirmations, not just that it uses admin privileges. Terminal warns about more potentially dangerous commands Corentin fixed an issue where long commands could resize windows. Jeremy fixed an issue where tab labels didn’t properly update when using screen or ssh. And he made sure we properly close tabs when using the exit command. And More A few small bug fixes for our Window Manager: Corentin resolved a potential crasher, Leo improved dock hide animations, and Leonhard fixed an issue with revealing the panel over fullscreen apps. A new Hardware Enablement stack has arrived thanks to Ubuntu! This includes Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25 which brings support for newer hardware as well as some big performance gains and potential battery life improvements. OMG! Ubuntu! breaks down all the nerdy details here Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Maps Last month, Ryo made the last release of Atlas on AppCenter because we’ll soon be shipping it by default in elementary OS as Maps! As part of our work to improve the experience on computers you take with you—like notebooks and tablets—we’ve been working on features that use your location, and shipping a Maps app is part of that work. An in-development version of the new Maps Our hope with Maps is to improve support for mapping and location features in our platform libraries and to improve experiences in other apps like Tasks and Calendar as well as 3rd party apps in AppCenter. We’ve also already made a tiny improvement to the wider Freedesktop ecosystem by documenting a standard location icon used across desktops and in Portals. We’re really looking forward to getting your feedback and learning how we can improve experiences for apps that use your location in elementary OS. Window Manager & Dock First up is some new eye candy. We’ve heard requests for transparency and blur over the years and I’m happy to report we’re now experimenting with some new effects in shell elements like the alt + tab Window Switcher. We want to make sure to carefully balance shiny effects with performance and legibility, so be sure to send in your feedback. We’re also on track to apply some blur behind the Dock soon, so watch out for that. Blur effects have landed in the window switcher and are coming to the Dock Speaking of the Dock, you may have noticed that it’s now sticking around when in Multitasking View! We’ve replaced the old workspace switcher and you can now launch apps from the Dock directly into different workspaces to quickly get things set up exactly how you like. We’ve also merged in a new feature to monitor background apps that use the cross-platform Background Portal. Here you can not only manage background apps, but also see an explanation of what exactly they’re doing while running. With these features, we’re seeing years of design and development work come together: an improved way to multitask on elementary OS whether you use a mouse at your desktop, multitouch gestures on your laptop or tablet, or rely on keyboard shortcuts to get the job done. I’m extremely proud of what the team has done here and look forward from hearing more from you about it! Background apps now show in the Dock And that’s not all. Building on the previously mentioned Gesture Controller, the new Touchpad backend for multitouch gestures has also landed. This replaces Touchégg in the Secure Session as the way to track multitouch gestures, fixes bugs, and enables new features like two-dimensional swiping between workspaces and the full Multitasking View. So if you are a fan of gestures on your notebook, we’d love for you to try it out and report back before we ship it for everyone. Hardware Support Last but not least, we’re now building Universal EFI install images for ARM64 processors. This means instead of building unique ARM images for every hardware platform, we can build a single universal image for platforms like Pinebook, Raspberry Pi, and M-series Macs. These builds are still experimental and come with a few bugs, but we’d love folks to give them a spin in a virtual machine or on a spare computer and report back. If everything looks good, we may be able to offer stable ARM64 downloads starting with OS 8.1 later this year. Sponsors I want to give special thanks this month to Ryan Prior for his extremely generous one-time sponsorship! Ryan noted that this sponsorship was dedicated to the hard work of Renato who has been translating elementary OS into Brazilian Portuguese. Thanks a ton for your work Renato! At the moment we’re at 22% of our monthly funding goal and 332 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

3 weeks ago 21 votes
Supporting Disability Is Our Social Responsibility

July is Disability Pride Month, an opportunity for us to consider how we’re serving our disabled community and work on breaking down barriers to access. Last year we had the pleasure of being introduced to Florian—a fully blind cybersecurity enthusiast—and thanks to his feedback we completely rewrote navigation in Onboarding to be more keyboard and screen reader friendly, as well as took another look at Installation and Initial Setup to vastly improve our entire first run experience for blind folks. Plus, we implemented the screen reader interface in the Alt + Tab window switcher. Thanks to this feedback, elementary OS 8 can be installed and set up completely blind, an important win for maintaining your independence as a person with vision disabilities. Danielle Foré Founder & CEO Wed, Jul 3, 2024 7 min read Since the release of OS 8 we’ve been working on things like improving contrast, support for Dark Mode screenshots and brand colors in AppCenter, turning on or snoozing Dark Mode without canceling your schedule, expanding the scope of the “Reduce Motion” setting, and adding more options to reduce distracting notification bubbles. Plus, thanks to feedback from Aaron who you may know from his blog series on Linux accessibility, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both got releases that add screen reader support. As a community that includes folks with a range of disabilities ourselves, we’re deeply invested in improving access to Open Source software. We succeed at our mission when we build open computing experiences that are available regardless of ability and fail when accessibility is considered an afterthought or a nice-to-have. This month and always, Inclusive Design is at the core of what we do and we will continue to strive towards that ideal. If you want to follow along or help us address accessibility issues in elementary OS, we’d love your help! We’re tracking issues in this GitHub project. If you discover a new issue—accessibility related or otherwise—we’d love to get your feedback and we have a handy contributor guide to help you file a report here. Code A big new release of Code is here, thanks primarily to Jeremy. This release closes 19 reported issues including a couple of crashers. The “Open in…” menu is now sorted and includes an option for the Terminal pane. Plus the Terminal pane now follows Natural Copy/Paste settings from the Terminal app. The Vala symbols pane now shows a lot more information about symbols in their tooltips. Numbered lists are now handled correctly by the Markdown plugin. The Highlight Word Selection plugin now works with selections of more than one word. Several enhancements were made to managing git branches including sorting branch names alphabetically, the ability to switch to remote branches, and you’ll now be asked how to handle uncommitted changes when switching branches. You can now create edit marks by clicking in the source view gutter. They can be jumped between via the context menu or with the keyboard shortcuts Alt + ← / →. If you’re using the Flatpak version of Code on another OS, the “Open in…” menu is no longer empty and operations that require a network should now work. Plus performance was improved in several cases. Window Manager & Dock This month Leonhard and Leo closed another 19 issue reports in our window manager, including several issues related to multi-monitor, the Multitasking View, and Dock behavior. A crash that could occur when closing LibreOffice windows was fixed. Picture-in-picture will now select the correctly window when its area selection is drawn over an app’s shadow. Non-flatpak apps that don’t correctly match their launchers can now sometimes be matched by the Dock anyways. If you have “activate hotcorners in fullscreen” turned on, you can also now access the Applications Menu with Super while playing a fullscreen game, for example. Plus we made some performance improvements to drawing shadows. System Settings In Keyboard → Shortcuts → Custom you can now choose from a list of installed apps and their actions—in addition to being able to execute custom commands—thanks to Leo. This makes it super straightforward to add a keyboard shortcut for your most common workflows like composing a new email or adding a new Calendar event. You can now create custom keyboard shortcuts for apps and their actions System Settings will also now warn you if your desired keyboard shortcut conflicts with a common system shortcut like “Copy”, “Paste”, or “New Tab”. Plus we fixed an issue that would prevent certain Housekeeping configurations from running, and the “Automatic” accent color option now works more reliably. And More The Screencast Portal now features an improved design for selecting which display or window should be captured, as well as respecting options for capturing the pointer. Plus we fixed issues that prevented screenshots from including window shadows in some cases, and screenshot notifications now open the Image Viewer when clicked. Screencasts portal has a new design Jeremy fixed a number of issues in the latest release of Files including issues related to file renaming, drag-and-drop, ejecting removable drives, and an issue activating context menus from certain parts of the sidebar. And he also fixed an issue preventing bluetooth file sharing from working. Plus, Leo made sure that panel transparency and orientation lock settings get synced to the Login & Lock screen. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Bluetooth Settings got a redesign and a reworking of its list sorting logic that should improve performance, reliability, and its screen reader experience. Especially of note, we now sort out more bluetooth devices so the list of nearby devices should be more concise and useful. Plus we fixed a few issues related to devices that require a passcode to pair, like some keyboards. This includes some fairly large changes so we could really use help testing for regressions before releasing this update for everyone. Bluetooth settings has a new design We’re also now building daily ARM64 Native images thanks to new contributer NN708. This is a universal ARM UEFI image, which means it should be a single image that runs on platforms like Raspberry Pi, Pinebook Pro, and Apple M-series Macs. This makes it a lot simpler for us to support ARM processors in future releasses of elementary OS. Please test these images on your ARM devices and report back! We now include additional processor architecture options in our issue report template to track any problems you experience. Download ARM64 Builds Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 322 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

2 months ago 32 votes
The First Pride Was a Riot, and So Are These Updates

Questionable puns aside, it’s Pride Month and we’re excited to celebrate by bringing you these updates hand-made by real LGBTQIA+ community members from around the world!—and possibly some straight cis folks too. This rainbow of releases includes some important accessibility updates, tons of bug fixes, and of course a few new features. Window Manager & Dock Another absolutely massive release of our window manager is out that fixes about 20 reported issues and a brand new Gesture Controller thanks to Leonhard and Leo. You can now Swipe up in Multitasking View to close windows, app titles in Multitasking View are now always shown—making them accessible for touch screen setups—and screenshots taken with a keyboard shortcut will send a notification that you can use to view it in Files, just to name a few headlining features. If you want to read the full release notes, Good Luck Babe they’re quite long. A new release of our Dock is also out which brings back a couple of old Plank features: showing multiple dots for apps with multiple running windows and cycling through app windows when you hold a drag-n-drop over its icon. Plus you can now open context menus with a long-press. And there’s a number of bug fixes including things related to hide modes and memory usage. Thanks again to Leo and Leonhard for their hard work here. System Settings Leonhard fixed a crash when setting custom hotcorner commands and we now only show the Applications Menu hotcorner action in its corresponding panel corner—that’s top-left for folks reading left-to-right and top-right for folks reading right-to-left. Plus there’s a new option to enable hotcorners even while an app is fullscreened. As a follow up to last month’s fixes, choosing light or dark mode in System Settings will now properly snooze your schedule instead of disabling it all together—a great convenience for those of us who suffer from eye strain or headaches and need to occasionally reach for that dark mode during the day. Plus, the Reduce Motion setting now covers a whole new range of animations—perfect for folks who get motion sick or find animations distracting. Leonardo tackled a couple of crashes in Display settings including one when mirroring, and another when new displays are attached while System Settings is open. We fixed an issue that prevented CalDAV accounts from connecting in Online Accounts settings. And Alain snuck in a few design tweaks, fixing button alignments etc. And More Thanks to feedback from Aaron, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both got releases that add screen reader support. Corentin addressed some Flatpak sandbox issues with an updated Apparmor Profile—especially notable if you’d had trouble with Steam. We now use BeaconDB as our location services provider. And thanks to Ryo we’re now shipping the latest version of GNOME Web which brings improved performance and web compatibility as well as a redesigned bookmarks sidebar. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Community Pride I want to take a little space to say that our community is for everyone regardless of gender or sexual identity. We’ve long been made up of lots of different kinds of folks and I’m really proud of that. Open Source software should never be a space that is restricted to a narrow set of identities. In a time where many companies are withdrawing their support for the LGBTQIA+ community, I think it’s incredibly important that we make a strong statement against hate and don’t give in to the pressure to erase queer people in some sad attempt to be “apolitical”. Free Software has always been political, and its politics are freedom and inclusivity and so are ours. Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 336 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

3 months ago 30 votes
A Little Bit Now, A Lotta Bit Later

In mid-March we released a big bug fix update—elementary OS 8.0.1—and since then we’ve been hard at work on even more bug fixes and some new exciting features that I’m excited to share with you today! Read ahead to find out what we’ve released recently and what you can help us test in Early Access. Quick Settings Quick Settings has a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle Leo added a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle. This is useful when you’re giving a presentation or have a long-running background task where you want to temporarily avoid letting the computer go to sleep on its normal schedule. We also fixed a bug where the “Dark Mode” toggle would cancel the dark mode schedule when used. We now have proper schedule snoozing, so when you manually toggle Dark Mode on or off while using a timed or sunset-to-sunrise schedule, your schedule will resume on the next schedule change instead of being canceled completely. Vishal also fixed an issue that caused some apps to report being improperly closed on system shutdown or restart and on the lock screen we now show the “Suspend” button rather than the “Lock” button. System Settings Locale settings has a fresh layout thanks to Alain with its options aligned more cleanly and improved links to additional settings. Locale Settings has a more responsive design We’ve also added the phrase “about this device” as a search term for the System page and improved interface copy when a restart is required to finish installing updates based on your feedback. Plus, Stanisław improved stylus detection in Wacom settings preventing a crash when no stylus is found. AppCenter We now show a small label next to the download button for apps which contain in-app purchases. This is especially useful for easily identifying free-to-play games or alt stores like Steam or Heroic Games Launcher. AppCenter now shows when apps have in-app purchases Plus, we now reload app icons on-the-fly as their data is processed, thanks to Italo. That means you’ll no longer get occasionally stuck with an AppCenter which shows missing images for app’s who have taken a bit longer than usual to load. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Our development focus recently has been on some of the bigger features that will likely land for either elementary OS 8.1 or 9. We’ve got a new app, big changes to the design of our desktop itself, a whole lot of under-the-hood cleanup, and the return of some key system services thanks to a new open source project. Monitor We’re now shipping a System Monitor app by default By popular demand—and thanks to the hard work of Stanisław—we have a new system monitor app called “Monitor” shipping in Early Access. Monitor provides usage information for your processor, GPU, memory, storage, network, and currently running processes. You can optionally see system information in the panel with Monitor You can also optionally get a ton of glanceable information shown in the panel. There’s currently a lot of work happening to port Monitor to GTK4 and improve its functionality under the Secure Session, so make sure to report any issues you find! Multitasking The Dock is getting a workspace switcher Probably the biggest change to the Pantheon shell since its early inception, the Dock is getting a new workspace switcher! The workspace switcher works in a familiar way to the one you may have seen in the Multitasking View: Your currently open workspaces are represented as tiles with the icons of apps running on them; You can select a workspace to switch to it; You can drag-and-drop workspaces to rearrange them; And you can use the “+” button to create a new blank workspace. One new trick however is that selecting the workspace you’re already on will launch Multitasking View. The new workspace switcher makes it so much more accessible to multitask with just the mouse and get an overview of your workflows without having to first enter the Multitasking View. We’re really excited to hear what people think about it! You can close apps from Multitasking View by swiping up Another very satisfying feature for folks using touch input, you can now swipe up windows in the Multitasking View to close them. This is a really familiar gesture for those of us with Android and iOS devices and feels really natural for managing a big stack of windows without having to aim for a small “x” button. GTK4 Porting We’ve recently landed the port of Tasks to GTK4. So far that comes with a few fixes to tighten up its design, with much more possible in the future. Please make sure to help us test it thoroughly for any regressions! Tasks has a slightly tightened up design We’re also making great progress on porting the panel to GTK4. So far we have branches in review for Nightlight, Bluetooth, Datetime, and Network indicators. Power, Keyboard, and Quick Settings indicators all have in-progress branches. That leaves just Applications, Sound, and Notifications. So far these ports don’t come with major feature changes, but they do involve lots of cleaning up and modernizing of these code bases and in some cases fixing bugs! When the port is finished, we should see immediate performance gains and we’ll have a much better foundation for future releases. You can follow along with our progress porting everything to GTK4 in this GitHub Project. And More When you take a screenshot using keyboard shortcuts or by secondary-clicking an app’s window handle, we now send a notification letting you know that it was succesful and where to find the resulting image. Plus there’s a handy button that opens Files with your screenshot pre-selected. We’re also testing beaconDB as a replacement for Mozilla Location Services (MLS). If you’re not aware, we relied on MLS in previous versions of elementary OS to provide location information for devices that don’t have a GPS radio. Unfortunately Mozilla discontinued the service last June and we’ve been left without a replacement until now. Without these services, not only did maps and weather apps cease to function, but system features like automatic timezone detection and features that rely on sunset and sunrise times no longer work properly. beaconDB offers a drop-in replacement for MLS that uses Wireless networks, bluetooth devices, and cell towers to provide location data when requested. All of its data is crowd-sourced and opt-in and several distributions are now defaulting to using it as their location services data provider. I’ve set up a small sponsorship from elementary on Liberapay to support the project. If you can help support beaconDB either by sponsoring or providing stumbler data, I’d highly encourage you to do so! Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 336 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

4 months ago 42 votes
elementary OS 8.0.1 Available Now

It’s been a little over 100 days since elementary OS 8 was released, and we’re proud to announce another round of updates, including a fresh new download. We’ve been hard at work this winter addressing issues that you reported and we’ve added a couple new creature comforts along the way. This bug fix release also includes the latest Ubuntu LTS Hardware Enablement Kernel, so it’s worth checking out if you downloaded OS 8.0 and it disagreed with your hardware. AppCenter We now properly use dark mode brand colors and dark mode screenshots thanks to Italo. Plus, when developers provide screenshots for multiple desktop environments, we now prefer the ones intended for our desktop environment, Pantheon. We support the new <Developer> Appstream tag, thanks to Juan. And we now support the contribute URL type. AppCenter now shows dark mode screenshots when available Italo also fixed some issues with release notes overflowing out of their container, and we slightly redesigned the release notes window in the Updates page. He also addressed a few other issues in the Updates page that could occur while things were being updated or refreshed and made sure AppCenter recovers gracefully when its cache is emptied. Release notes dialogs have been slightly redesigned Search is also much faster thanks to Leonhard. And for developers, Ryo fixed loading your local metadata for testing with the --load-local terminal option. Files & Terminal Jeremy fixed another half-dozen reported issues in Files, including an issue that prevented entering file paths in search mode, an issue that prevented scrolling after deleting files, and an issue where files would disappear when dropped on an unmounted drive. The New file submenu now respects the hierarchy of folders in Templates. We now also respect the admin:// uri protocol for opening a path as an administrator, and Files is now styled correctly when run as administrator. He also fixed an issue where Terminal tabs took multiple clicks to focus, and an issue where keyboard shortcuts stopped working for tabs that had been dragged into their own new window. Plus, file paths and names are also now properly quoted when drag-and-dropped from Files into Terminal. System Settings System Settings now allows configuring its notifications in System Settings → Notications. So you can turn off bubbles if you don’t want to receive notifications about updates, for example. We’ll also no longer automatically download updates when on metered connections and send a notification instead, thanks to Leonhard. Plus we no longer check for updates in Demo Mode. Updates now show their download size and you can see progress towards our monthly sponsorship goal In System, Vishal made sure we show how large an update will be before downloading it and that we skip held-back packages—such as phased or staged updates—when preparing the updates bundle so that it will more reliably succeed. Alain added a progress bar while downloading. And Ryo made sure the last refresh time is more accurate when no updates are available. Alain also added a new progress bar that represents how close we are to meeting our monthly sponsorship goal. In Applications, you can now disallow notifications access. This is especially useful for apps which use the notifications portal, but don’t properly report their notification usage and can’t be controlled in the Notifications settings page. Reign in apps that don’t appear in Notifications settings In Network there are two new settings: whether a network should be automatically connected to when available and whether to reduce background data usage when connected to that network. Disable autoconnect or mark a network as metered We also updated the pointer icons in Mouse & Touchpad settings and the checkmarks in Locale settings will now respect your chosen accent color. Plus settings pages with sidebars now remember the width you adjusted them to, thanks to Alain. Installation & Onboarding David fixed a crash with certain partitioning schemes in the Installer’s custom install view. And the Encryption step was redesigned to fit on a single page, solving an issue with confusing navigation. Plus, onboarding will now always stay centered on the screen, even when resized. Panel & Quick Settings Ilya fixed an issue with the panel height when using the Classic session and HiDPI displays. The app context menu in the Applications menu now shows a “Keep in Dock” checkbox, just like in the Dock thanks to Stella. In the Power menu, we now show the device model if available, and avoid erroneously showing an empty battery icon thanks to Alain. In the Sound menu, Dmitry fixed loading album art from certain apps like Google Chrome, and we fixed an issue where player icons could become too large. See who else is logged in and quickly switch accounts from Quick Settings In Quick settings, Leonhard fixed an issue with performing updates while shutting down. And Alain added a new page where you can see which other people are logged in and quickly switch between accounts. Dock Leo added a bit more spacing between launchers and their running indicators, and fixed an issue where larger icons could be clipped at the peak of their bounce animation. Apps who don’t notify on startup will no longer bounce in the dock indefinitely, thanks to Leonhard. We fixed an issue where the dock would still receive click events while hidden in the Classic session. Plus the dock now has an opaque style when “Panel Translucency” is turned off in System Settings → Desktop → Dock & Panel. Window Manager We have another huge release of our window manager thanks to Leonhard and Leo. This release fixes five potential crashes, over a dozen reported issues, fixes related to both the Classic and Secure sessions, issues related to HiDPI, and more, plus performance improvements. It’s worth reading the full release notes on GitHub if you have been waiting for the fix for a specific issue. And More OS 8.0.1 includes the latest long-term support Hardware Enablement stack from Ubuntu, including Linux 6.11. This brings improved performance for AMD processors, support for Intel “Lunar Lake” processors, and filesystem performance improvements in some cases. Plus support for certain webcams, USB network devices, joysticks, and more. Leo fixed an issue where connecting Bluetooth devices could cause the Lock Screen to freeze. You can now close the captive network assistant with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Q, thanks to Stanisław. And Alain fixed copying screenshots to the clipboard. We fixed an issue where wired network connections could fail to connect due to a change in Ubuntu. We’re pursuing this issue upstream and working on a way to ship the fix as an update, but for now fixing this issue requires either manual intervention through Terminal or a reinstall. We also now pre-install an AppArmor profile that fixes a number of Flatpak-related issues like not being to install certain runtime updates or apps not launching in the guest session or Demo mode. Special thanks to Uncle Tallest for investigating this issue and helping folks in our Discord who ran into it. And of course this release comes with a ton of translation updates! Special thanks to our hard-working internationalization community and especially Ryo who fixed a number of issues with things that couldn’t be localized properly in the previous release. Get elementary OS 8.0.1 elementary OS 8.0.1 is available as a pay-what-you-can purchase at elementary.io today. Localized direct downloads and a torrent magnet link are provided. OS 8 FAQ Download elementary OS 8.0.1 Sponsors have been able to download OS 8.0.1 release candidates since last week, so if getting things before anyone else is important to you, consider sponsoring us on GitHub

5 months ago 69 votes

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16 hours ago 5 votes
Trying to Make Sense of Casing Conventions on the Web

(I present to you my stream of consciousness on the topic of casing as it applies to the web platform.) I’m reading about the new command and commandfor attributes — which I’m super excited about, declarative behavior invocation in HTML? YES PLEASE!! — and one thing that strikes me is the casing in these APIs. For example, the command attribute has a variety of values in HTML which correspond to APIs in JavaScript. The show-popover attribute value maps to .showPopover() in JavaScript. hide-popover maps to .hidePopover(), etc. So what we have is: lowercase in attribute names e.g. commandfor="..." kebab-case in attribute values e.g. show-popover camelCase for JS counterparts e.g. showPopover() After thinking about this a little more, I remember that HTML attributes names are case insensitive, so the browser will normalize them to lowercase during parsing. Given that, I suppose you could write commandFor="..." but it’s effectively the same. Ok, lowercase attribute names in HTML makes sense. The related popover attributes follow the same convention: popovertarget popovertargetaction And there are many other attribute names in HTML that are lowercase, e.g.: maxlength novalidate contenteditable autocomplete formenctype So that all makes sense. But wait, there are some attribute names with hyphens in them, like aria-label="..." and data-value="...". So why isn’t it command-for="..."? Well, upon further reflection, I suppose those attributes were named that way for extensibility’s sake: they are essentially wildcard attributes that represent a family of attributes that are all under the same namespace: aria-* and data-*. But wait, isn’t that an argument for doing popover-target and popover-target-action? Or command and command-for? But wait (I keep saying that) there are kebab-case attribute names in HTML — like http-equiv on the <meta> tag, or accept-charset on the form tag — but those seem more like legacy exceptions. It seems like the only answer here is: there is no rule. Naming is driven by convention and decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. But if I had to summarize, it would probably be that the default casing for new APIs tends to follow the rules I outlined at the start (and what’s reflected in the new command APIs): lowercase for HTML attributes names kebab-case for HTML attribute values camelCase for JS counterparts Let’s not even get into SVG attribute names We need one of those “bless this mess” signs that we can hang over the World Wide Web. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

2 days ago 6 votes
The Angels and Demons of Nondeterminism

Greetings everyone! You might have noticed that it's September and I don't have the next version of Logic for Programmers ready. As penance, here's ten free copies of the book. So a few months ago I wrote a newsletter about how we use nondeterminism in formal methods. The overarching idea: Nondeterminism is when multiple paths are possible from a starting state. A system preserves a property if it holds on all possible paths. If even one path violates the property, then we have a bug. An intuitive model of this is that for this is that when faced with a nondeterministic choice, the system always makes the worst possible choice. This is sometimes called demonic nondeterminism and is favored in formal methods because we are paranoid to a fault. The opposite would be angelic nondeterminism, where the system always makes the best possible choice. A property then holds if any possible path satisfies that property.1 This is not as common in FM, but it still has its uses! "Players can access the secret level" or "We can always shut down the computer" are reachability properties, that something is possible even if not actually done. In broader computer science research, I'd say that angelic nondeterminism is more popular, due to its widespread use in complexity analysis and programming languages. Complexity Analysis P is the set of all "decision problems" (basically, boolean functions) can be solved in polynomial time: there's an algorithm that's worst-case in O(n), O(n²), O(n³), etc.2 NP is the set of all problems that can be solved in polynomial time by an algorithm with angelic nondeterminism.3 For example, the question "does list l contain x" can be solved in O(1) time by a nondeterministic algorithm: fun is_member(l: List[T], x: T): bool { if l == [] {return false}; guess i in 0..<(len(l)-1); return l[i] == x; } Say call is_member([a, b, c, d], c). The best possible choice would be to guess i = 2, which would correctly return true. Now call is_member([a, b], d). No matter what we guess, the algorithm correctly returns false. and just return false. Ergo, O(1). NP stands for "Nondeterministic Polynomial". (And I just now realized something pretty cool: you can say that P is the set of all problems solvable in polynomial time under demonic nondeterminism, which is a nice parallel between the two classes.) Computer scientists have proven that angelic nondeterminism doesn't give us any more "power": there are no problems solvable with AN that aren't also solvable deterministically. The big question is whether AN is more efficient: it is widely believed, but not proven, that there are problems in NP but not in P. Most famously, "Is there any variable assignment that makes this boolean formula true?" A polynomial AN algorithm is again easy: fun SAT(f(x1, x2, …: bool): bool): bool { N = num_params(f) for i in 1..=num_params(f) { guess x_i in {true, false} } return f(x_1, x_2, …) } The best deterministic algorithms we have to solve the same problem are worst-case exponential with the number of boolean parameters. This a real frustrating problem because real computers don't have angelic nondeterminism, so problems like SAT remain hard. We can solve most "well-behaved" instances of the problem in reasonable time, but the worst-case instances get intractable real fast. Means of Abstraction We can directly turn an AN algorithm into a (possibly much slower) deterministic algorithm, such as by backtracking. This makes AN a pretty good abstraction over what an algorithm is doing. Does the regex (a+b)\1+ match "abaabaabaab"? Yes, if the regex engine nondeterministically guesses that it needs to start at the third letter and make the group aab. How does my PL's regex implementation find that match? I dunno, backtracking or NFA construction or something, I don't need to know the deterministic specifics in order to use the nondeterministic abstraction. Neel Krishnaswami has a great definition of 'declarative language': "any language with a semantics has some nontrivial existential quantifiers in it". I'm not sure if this is identical to saying "a language with an angelic nondeterministic abstraction", but they must be pretty close, and all of his examples match: SQL's selects and joins Parsing DSLs Logic programming's unification Constraint solving On top of that I'd add CSS selectors and planner's actions; all nondeterministic abstractions over a deterministic implementation. He also says that the things programmers hate most in declarative languages are features that "that expose the operational model": constraint solver search strategies, Prolog cuts, regex backreferences, etc. Which again matches my experiences with angelic nondeterminism: I dread features that force me to understand the deterministic implementation. But they're necessary, since P probably != NP and so we need to worry about operational optimizations. Eldritch Nondeterminism If you need to know the ratio of good/bad paths, the number of good paths, or probability, or anything more than "there is a good path" or "there is a bad path", you are beyond the reach of heaven or hell. Angelic and demonic nondeterminism are duals: angelic returns "yes" if some choice: correct and demonic returns "no" if !all choice: correct, which is the same as some choice: !correct. ↩ Pet peeve about Big-O notation: O(n²) is the set of all algorithms that, for sufficiently large problem sizes, grow no faster that quadratically. "Bubblesort has O(n²) complexity" should be written Bubblesort in O(n²), not Bubblesort = O(n²). ↩ To be precise, solvable in polynomial time by a Nondeterministic Turing Machine, a very particular model of computation. We can broadly talk about P and NP without framing everything in terms of Turing machines, but some details of complexity classes (like the existence "weak NP-hardness") kinda need Turing machines to make sense. ↩

2 days ago 7 votes
Announcing the 2025 TokyoDev Developers Survey

The 2025 edition of the TokyoDev Developer Survey is now live! If you’re a software developer living in Japan, please take a few minutes to participate. All questions are optional, and it should take less than 10 minutes to complete. The survey will remain open until September 30th. Last year, we received over 800 responses. Highlights included: Median compensation remained stable. The pay gap between international and Japanese companies narrowed to 47%. Fewer respondents had the option to work fully remotely. For 2025, we’ve added several new questions, including a dedicated section on one of the most talked-about topics in development today: AI. The survey is completely anonymous, and only aggregated results will be shared—never personally identifiable information. The more responses we get, the deeper and more meaningful our insights will be. Please help by taking the survey and sharing it with your peers!

2 days ago 9 votes