New Tuner extensible control center released for GNOME thanks to ALT Linux team

Another week has passed us by and the GNOME community has been as busy as always, improving core GNOME features, GNOME Circle and third-party apps, as well as the mobile experience of GNOME. This week saw improvements to the backup app Deja Dup, the Halftone image viewer, and a new extensible settings management center called Tuner.

New GNOME Core App Updates

This week we got two enhancements for core GNOME software. GLib, a foundational GNOME library, has been improved so that journal messages output by apps are easier to find. For developers using GNOME Web, there is now a preferences page for tech preview builds, allowing you to test WebKit features at runtime. Those using the regular version of GNOME Web can access these new settings by opening Web from the command line with this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.ui webkit-features-page true

GNOME Circle and Tuner: A New Extensible GNOME Control Center

One of the GNOME-related apps that got a notable update this week was Deja Dup Backups. It now has an enhanced file restoration process that integrates with native file managers, giving you a more streamlined experience. This was achieved by adding support for the restic mount.

Next up, the image viewer Halftone, which is now on version 0.7.0, has just added the ability to zoom in on images. It also brings improved error handling to enhance user interaction and reliability. In earlier versions, users were not informed well about errors occurring during image loading, resulting in endless loading screens. This is fixed now.

The final update in this section is that a new extensible settings management center for GNOME, called Tuner, is now available.

It has been designed with flexibility and convenience in mind, allowing GNOME users to build a personalized control center using plugins. With this, everyone can have a settings center with options they find useful. It was developed with the help of ALT Linux developers.

The Tuner control center uses libpeas to deliver a dynamic and modular app allowing developers to build plugins for the community to install. While it doesn't do this yet, you could imagine in the future plugins being made available for Tuner to replicate the functionality of apps like GNOME Tweaks, as well as other settings, taking customization to another level.

Tuner doesn't only give users a modular settings app, it also allows GNOME-based distributions to use Tuner as a hub for distribution-specific settings. ALT Linux has already started using it in fact by including the TunerPanel module for managing panel mode. It'll be interesting to see if other distros pick it up.

One Linux distribution that could benefit from Tuner is Ubuntu which ships with a slightly tweaked version of the GNOME Linux desktop environment. Canonical could give users the options to disable its tweaks through Tuner if it ever decided to, which would appeal to fans of vanilla GNOME.

As a new piece of software, the developers are inviting people to contribute plugins. There is a quick guide available with an example using the Vala language. There are also template repositories for making plugins available in Vala and Python, plus documentation in Valadoc format.

Mobile Experience on GNOME

Finally, Phosh has been updated to version 0.47.0 this week bringing with it a "Do not disturb" toggle and improved on-screen keyboard. Phosh, for those that don’t know, is GNOME designed for the mobile phone. The devices that can run this are pretty limited as it’s aimed at devices that come with Linux out of the box such as Purism and PINEPHONE devices. Devices that support postmarketOS can also run it.

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