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

It’s only been a little over 2 weeks since we released elementary OS 8, but we’re already back with updates just in time for the holidays! Terminal The headliner this month is Terminal which comes with a bunch of fixes and new features thanks to Jeremy. It now uses the more modern tab bar widget you’re used to from Web, Files, and Code. There’s an overlay bar that shows the current zoom level when it changes. We do a better job of handling URIs which contain spaces. And we now show unsafe paste warnings for Drag n Drop operations. Plus, we now show the unsafe paste warning for more commands like doas thanks to Elsie and there’s a new option in the gear menu to toggle unsafe paste alerts thanks to Stella and Charlie. Michal upped the contrast for gray in our default style and Igor made sure we focus the relevant tab when notifications are clicked. Plus, we now replace notifications from the same tab and withdraw notifications when a tab is focused, so your notification center should be a lot less noisy. This release was really a group effort with several new contributors, so major shoutouts to everyone who worked on it! AppCenter AppCenter will use Dark Mode screenshots when available Thanks to Italo, AppCenter will now use provided dark mode screenshots and brand colors when developers provide them. Plus, he addressed a visual bug with release notes. And Juan added support for the latest Appstream Developer tag, so we’re staying up on standards. Window Manager & Dock In the Window Manager, Leo fixed an issue where the dock could sometimes still be clicked when hidden in the Classic session, while Leonhard contributed some performance improvements. In the Dock, Leonhard made sure launcher bounces don’t run too long for apps that don’t notify on startup. Leo fixed an issue where launchers with large icons could become clipped while they bounce and made sure running indicators have a bit more room to breath. Plus the dock now also respects the “Panel Translucency” setting, making it completely solid when requested for added contrast. System Settings Alain added some visual polish to the System view as well as a new progress bar that represents how close we are to meeting our monthly sponsorship goal. Plus Leonhard made sure automatic updates won’t download on metered networks, and we avoid checking for system updates altogether in Demo Mode. We now show monthly funding goal progress right in System Settings You can now prevent Apps from sending notifications from Applications → Permissions, even for apps that don’t report their notification usage in Notification settings. and the check mark next to the current language in Language & Region settings will now follow your accent color thanks to Leo. Installation & Onboarding David fixed a crash with certain partitioning schemes in the Installer’s custom install view, and the encrypt view was simplified. Onboarding will now always stay centered on the screen, even when resized. Icon Browser A new version of the Icon Browser for app developers is available in AppCenter that includes the latest icons for Platform 8 as well as a quick button for copying code snippets thanks to Ryo. And we now focus the search automatically when you start typing, thanks to Alain. And More You can now close the captive network assistant with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Q, thanks to Stanisław. Alain fixed copying screenshots to the clipboard. And there a ton of translation updates, especially including traditional Chinese thanks to Kisaragi. Sponsors At the moment we’re at 22% of our monthly funding goal and 430 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.

This month’s update is fairly brief since a lot of what we did last month was minor bug fixes, regression testing, updating metadata, taking screenshots, and releasing packages. We’re getting down to the last few items before we can release elementary OS 8. Read ahead to find out more! OS 7 Updates Just a couple of small OS 7 updates this month! Ryan backported a fix for an issue in AppCenter where the updates page would continue to show the loading screen after it was finished loading. And the latest Network Indicator was released and now shows cellular modems as toggle buttons like it does with other devices. Cellular modems now show as toggle buttons OS 8 Updates Continuing on with our work to vastly improve screen reader support this cycle, Leo implemented the accessibility interface in the Alt + Tab window switcher! Leonhard added a new option to the system shutdown dialog so you can choose to skip a pending update, even when automatic updates are enabled. You can choose to skip updates when shutting down or restarting If you have a mixed-dpi setup—like a HiDPI laptop or tablet and a LoDPI external monitor—You can now set per-display scaling in the Secure Session thanks to Leonhard. And power modes can also now be quickly changed from the power indicator thanks to Subhadeep. Power modes now appear in the power indicator Release Planning Last month we finished releasing nearly every component that makes up elementary OS—over 80 packages. The only thing left is the Login & Lock Screen which is blocked by two small issues. We also have just two more OS patches to complete. Once these issues are resolved and the Login & Lock Screen has a package release, we can build release-candidate images of elementary OS 8 from the stable updates channel—and these builds will be available to Sponsors in Early Access right away. There’s still a couple more issues we want to try to solve before the final public OS 8 release, but we’re very close! As always you can follow along with our progress towards the release of OS 8 in this GitHub project. When this project board is empty, it’s public release time! Sponsors At the moment we’re at 20% of our monthly funding goal and 385 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.

This month we have a bunch of surprise updates for OS 7 and as always a progress update on OS 8. We’re getting very close to releasing the latest version of our operating system and that means releasing new versions of all of the projects we maintain! That means big new versions of apps and new platform features, some of which we’re also able to release as an update for OS 7. Community Just a little follow up on our Discord community: we’re now just over 550 members! It’s quickly becoming a great place to ask questions and get help, share ideas, and generally hang out and chat with other people who use elementary OS or run Pantheon on other Linux distributions. It’s been really fun to watch this server grow and I’m really excited to participate more in a much less formal way with our community. Join us on Discord OS 7 Updates While most of the releases going out at the moment are exclusive to OS 8, there were still a number of significant updates that we were able to release for OS 7! This is in large part due to shipping many of our apps as Flatpak packages, but it also includes a sneaky platform update that you might not even know you needed. Videos Videos has a new modern and minimalist design Videos now sports a more modern and minimal design which is especially apparent on the player page. On the library page it uses larger landscape format thumbnails and the app now follows the system light and dark style preference. The upgrade to GTK4 also brings performance improvements. Major shoutouts to Leonhard for his work modernizing this code base. Videos—like all of our Flatpak apps—is of course also available to download as a Flatpak for folks running Linux distros other than elementary OS: Download Videos as Flatpak Developer Tools Code now uses the LibHandy tab bar widget which brings improved animations and drag-n-drop behavior. The Terminal pane can now open to your preference of project subdirectory by default. The preferences dialog was slightly redesigned to fit more modern platform conventions and improve screen reader compatibility. And we fixed a dozen reported issues! There’s a new setting in Terminal for event alerts on invalid input and we now do a better job saving tab state. Plus man page documentation has been improved. Restoring tabs from last time is now optional in Files and it now supports hiding files and folders via a .hidden file, a feature you may be familiar with from other file manager apps. Special thanks go to Colin, Gustavo, and Jeremy for working on our developer tools. Portals Portals are special API that apps can use to access system features in a way that respects your privacy and requires your explicit consent. Three new Portals are now supported in OS 7: Color Picker, Screenshot, and Screencast. These portals are essential for maintaining compatibility with modern apps which are written to work in a Wayland world and don’t have direct access to the pixels on your display. If you’ve previously experienced trouble using modern color picker or screen recording apps from alt stores like Flathub on elementary OS 7, this update should fix that for you! Thanks to Davidand Leonhard for their work here! And More Music can now open individual audio files from within the app instead of requiring you to open them from within Files and it gains the now-familiar sticky toolbar style when scrolling in the queue. Camera has been updated to use GTK4 which for now simply means improved performance. And a new Tasks release fixes an issue where it would crash when the system style was changed from light to dark. OS 8 Updates We’ve landed a rename of the session options on the Lock Screen to hopefully improve clarity for folks that aren’t sure if they should be using a Wayland or X11 session. The X11 session is now called the “Compatibility Session” since it offers improved compatibility with legacy apps and some accessibility tools. The Wayland session is now called the “Secure Session” since it requires apps to use modern APIs that improve your security and respect your privacy. There was a lot of back-and-forth discussion about the best way to concisely describe these sessions in a non-technical way—we’re aware these descriptions are not perfect—and we think that for now this the best way to sum up the trade offs when selecting a session. In the future this may change as new features may rely on Wayland and the performance benefits of Wayland become more distinct. But for now we want to make sure that folks who rely on the X11 session for certain workflows aren’t being discouraged by a word choice that doesn’t reflect their reality. And speaking of the compatibility session—pending approval of a new window manager protocol—we will be able to ship the new Dock in both the Secure and Compatibility sessions in OS 8. This is particularly great news since the new Dock offers a much better multitasking workflow based on the feedback we gathered in our survey; For those times you may need to switch back to the Compatibility session for certain apps you won’t need to manage disparate dock settings. Navigation in Onboarding has been rewritten for improved accessibility and with a neat progress bar On the heels of some of our recent accessibility work, I’m proud to say that navigation in Onboarding has been rewritten for much improved keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility. This was a show stopper when Florian took a look at OS 8 in June. Onboarding is such an important part of introducing a new operating system and making sure people new to elementary OS have a great time, so I’m particularly glad to improve this first impression for folks with vision-related disabilities. The Bluetooth Daemon was previously shipped in the same package as the Bluetooth Indicator and it now lives in its own separate package and has its own project. This should both make it clearer which components are responsible for which parts of Bluetooth features on elementary OS and make things a bit easier to maintain. For now features remain completely unchanged and this is purely organizational. We’re also now shipping Font Viewer as a Flatpak app. Previously we had packaged it and released it to AppCenter, but it is now pulled into OS 8 daily by default. This means we can continually ship the latest GNOME Font Viewer in elementary OS built against our Flatpak runtime so that it fits in stylistically. Release Planning Nearly everything is now released in the OS 8 stable repository, which means we’re very close to building stable release candidate quality builds for OS 8 in Early Access. At the moment we’re mainly waiting on the new Window Manager protocol for the Dock in the compatibility session which will unblock releases for the Dock and Panel. As always you can follow along with our progress towards the release of OS 8 in this GitHub project. At this rate we may be looking at a September release of OS 8 if everything goes smoothly; keep your fingers crossed! Sponsors At the moment we’re just above 21% of our monthly funding goal and we’re at 382 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.