Early work on a new GNOME OS installer has begun thanks to Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund

According to the latest update on This Week in GNOME, work has begun on a new installer for GNOME OS which should presumably make the install process more friendly. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many details about this project yet because it’s in the very early stages of development and doesn’t even have a git repo yet.

This installer is planned for use in GNOME OS, a nightly Linux distribution maintained by the GNOME Project to showcase all the latest cutting-edge changes. While other distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu will be free to use the installer, they both already have their own solutions.

This work is being conducted thanks to resources given by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund which aims to help open projects like GNOME. The German public sector partially relies on open source software so they probably think it’s important to financially support these projects.

Another cool project being worked on under the auspices of the Sovereign Tech Fund is the refactoring and code minimization between Nautilus and file chooser. There is also work being done on implementing an adaptive file chooser layout in case you need to make the window smaller.

Aside from refactoring in Nautilus, another developer has made a slight tweak to the floating bar in the file view in Nautilus. The change is ever so slight but makes it less intrusive, which is nice. You can see the change below:

Outside of these improvements to GNOME and GNOME OS, This Week in GNOME also mentioned that the GNOME Circle app Text Pieces 4.0 had been released after two years and is now available on Flathub. Text Pieces was completely rewritten and designed and includes the following new features and improvements:

• Redesigned interface.
• Redesigned terminology. Tools are now called actions, arguments are now called parameters.
• The application became fully asynchronous and now long-running actions do not freeze the interface and also can be cancelled.
• Added support for typed parameters. Now actions can have boolean or numeric parameters, not only string parameters.
• Built-in actions are now written in Rust and well-tested, which means that they run faster and are less likely to break.

For those unaware, GNOME Circle is a programme that was launched back in 2020 (time flies!) to give third-party developers perks for hosting their project on GNOME infrastructure and for following GNOME’s development rules.

Other improvements mentioned this week include support for 3+ trackpad finger gestures, regression fixes and cleanups in the Orca screen reader software, and more. If everything goes to plan, we should see all these changes land as part of GNOME 47 which is due for release on September 18.

Source: This Week in GNOME via Phoronix

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