Monitor The first release of Monitor as an elementary OS default app is here! Monitor is an app for monitoring your system resources and running processes, including with optional panel indicators. Since its last release, we’ve completed the port to GTK4, rewrote the settings menu, and a ton more under the hood. Massive thanks to Stanisław, Ryo, and more for their hard work here. Monitor running processes and available resources Monitor should be automatically installed on your next update, but if you for some reason don’t get it, you can install Monitor with the Terminal command sudo apt install io.elementary.monitor. Window Manager & Dock Another massive bug fix release of our Window Manager has landed with 19 fixed issues including improved performance, fixes for HiDPI, and better animations. We’ve fixed issues with dock menus sometimes appearing behind the dock, apps will now launch correctly when you switch between Classic and Secure sessions, and more. Blur effects have landed in the window switcher and are coming to the Dock Plus, this release introduces a new blur effect. You’ll first notice it in the Alt + Tab window switcher, but in future updates we will also blur behind the Dock and Notifications. Big thanks to Leo and Leonhard for their hard work on this release. Icons We landed a highly requested redesign of folder icons thanks to newhoa. The new folder design is more rounded and more closely matches the design of the Files app icon. Folder icons have been redesigned with rounded corners Icons featuring a computer mouse have been slightly redesigned to include a scroll wheel. And, icons featuring a mouse pointer have been updated to match the new pointer design, thanks to William. Mouse and Pointer icons have been updated Plus a number of smaller clean ups including adding missing sizes for certain icons, adjusting lighting, and rounding a few edges. Finally, we now fall back to Adwaita icons when an app is missing a non-standard icon name, thanks to David Lapshin. Code In the symbols sidebar, tooltips for C language symbols are now more information like their Vala counterparts. When you clone a git branch, we now send an unobtrusive toast to let you know cloning has completed. Global searches now respect your search case sensitivity settings. Opening a second window no longer results in duplicate project entries in the project chooser. And the “Open Folder” keyboard shortcut has been fixed. Shoutouts Jeremy for his hard work on Code. Files Jeremy also fixed a number of small issues with Files including expanding trashed folders in the list view, refreshing views properly when files are deleted, and preventing a potential freeze when the Templates folder contains too many files and subfolders. Plus, Files now shows a setting for Date & Time format. And More In Power settings we now show a small warning about increased energy usage with certain options. The Sound menu now uses a toggle icon like Quick Settings instead of a switch to quickly mute. And media keys for volume now work on the Lock Screen thanks to Leo. 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 We’re laser focused on preparing to release OS 8.1 so big new features will almost exclusively be targeted to OS 9 from now on. We don’t have OS 9 builds available yet for you to try, but we are working on them already! We’ll let sponsors know first when OS 9 builds are available in Early Access to test. But for now, we have just one more thing. 64-bit Universal ARM builds from the stable updates channel are now available on our Builds website. These builds replace the old device-specific builds for platforms like Raspberry Pi and Pinebook, plus they add support for other ARM devices supported by Linux. This is thanks to the hard work of NN708 who has been dedicated to seeing this project through over the several months it took to complete. Sponsors At the moment we’re at 24% of our monthly funding goal and 324 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.

It’s been about 6 months since our last minor release and the team has been busy! For all of the details about what’s new since OS 8.0.1, make sure to check out our posts from May until now. In this post I’ll just be covering our progress over the last month up until the release of OS 8.0.2. OS 8.1 is due to be released before year end and that post will be The Big One™ that wraps up every change since OS 8.0. So without further delay, let’s dive into what we did last month that made it in OS 8.0.2! Installer & Initial Setup The latest Installer incorporates fixes for a number of issues raised during accessibility testing. The “Before Installing”, “Try or Install”, “Choose a Disk”, and “Encryption” views should all have much improved accessible labels, things like password quality feedback will now be read aloud by the screen reader, and we fixed a couple instances where the screen reader would announce text style markup. Plus, Leo added a few more safety checks for the custom install view that should prevent crashes with certain complex partition layouts, and the Installer should now always appear centered on screen. Initial Setup also includes the same password quality feedback improvements for screen readers and it will always appear centered on screen. Plus trailing hyphens and underscores are now allowed in usernames and we use a more reliable source of information for keyboard layouts, thanks to Ryo. Music The latest release of Music includes a number of important new features for managing the queue, including performance improvements for large queues. You can now remove individual track from a track’s context menu or clear the entire queue thanks to Oowoosh0. Jeremy and Leonhard implemented searching by track name. The queue and the last played track will be saved and restored thanks to Stella, and she added the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+O to add new files. Ryan added the Ctrl+Q shortcut to quit, and album art will now show in media controls in the panel and elsewhere. Plus Oowoosh0 fixed a couple of issues with long artists names or when using large system fonts. Terminal Leo Fixed an issue that caused keyboard focus to not be inside the first tab when opening a new window, and he fixed an issue where dropping in text that contain # would be cut off. Jeremy also fixed an issue with incorrect line breaks when pasting or dropping text while a process is running, made sure to always clear process finished icons when a tab is selected, and removed an old misfeature that would cause window sizes to be odd on certain display sizes. Hardware Enablement OS 8.0.2 includes the latest long-term support Hardware Enablement stack from Ubuntu, including Linux 6.14. This new version of the Linux kernel brings improved performance—especially while gaming, reduced power consumption for certain AMD and Intel chipsets and GPUs, new security features, and support for more gamepads, wifi devices, microphones, and more. And More Main menus are now properly marked in Camera, and Videos and can be opened with the keyboard shortcut F10. In Calculator, Alain replaced the “Del” button with an icon, and the “New Window” action now shows in icon in places like keyboard shortcut settings. Trevor fixed a crash with screenshots which are much taller than they are wide and Ryo fixed an issue that caused screenshots not to be saved to custom locations. Get elementary OS 8.0.2 elementary OS 8.0.2 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 8.0.2 Sponsors have been able to download OS 8.0.2 release candidates since the beginning of the month, so if getting things before anyone else is important to you, consider sponsoring us on GitHub And Even More Expect another blog post soon detailing all of the new features that have been released since OS 8.0.2 was built and what’s available to test in Early Access—there are a number of big ones!

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.

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.