What’s New for Developers and System Administrators

GNOME 3.32 includes many new features and improvements for those working with GNOME technologies. Read on for more details!

Flatpak

Flatpak is the new cross-distribution, cross-desktop technology for application building and distribution. While it is separate from the GNOME project, Flatpak is central to GNOME’s developer experience plans.

This release cycle, a lot of effort was put into improving the command line user experience, including better progress reporting, searching and completion.

  • The new --columns option can be used to customize the output of all list-producing Flatpak commands. See the output of --columns=help for details.

  • Installation of application using the reverse DNS identifier is no longer necessary. Flatpak will ask a few questions and confirm which application is intended to be installed.

  • Flatpak list shows more useful information by including AppStream data.

  • Control flatpak processes with the new flatpak ps and flatpak kill commands.

  • Installation history can be inspected with the new history command.

Flathub, Flatpak’s new application distribution service, is growing steadily. It now hosts over 500 applications.

Builder

Builder underwent a major refactor this cycle. Approximately 100,000 lines of code were changed! Much of the changes were internal to the project, but will make future contributions far easier.

Builder has a new “project-less” mode. When opening a file directly (from either Files or Terminal), Builder opens in a simple, single-file interface. Access to the build foundry is not available from this view.

The project tree now shows Build Targets and Unit Tests, in addition to source files.

When viewing a “.ui” file, Builder now renders the file in a Glade/UI builder view instead of XML. This feature is still in its early stages of development.