New Gnome emerges blinking into the sunlight

The *nix desktop quit being awful in March, and reckons it's on the road to 'good'

Gnome's developers have let version 3.22 “Karlsruhe” (the city which hosts its primary European conference) loose on the world.

The release builds on March's 3.20 “Delhi” release, and the major shift this time around is that it rounds out Flatpak support.

The Flatpak – formerly xdg-app – framework has been fully assimilated; there's no need for users to drop down to the command line to install Flatpak apps.

Gnome's Software manager also shows when apps are sandboxed by Flatpak, and identifies the source of an application when the distribution doesn't provide it.

Other enhancements to Software include highlighting whether or not an application is free software, and more application tiles on the landing page.

Batch file renaming has been added to Gnome's Files app, supporting either search-and-replace or template-based names.

There's other stuff in Files that'll be familiar to windows or Mac users: archives can be unzipped with a double-click rather than having to call an application; likewise, archives can be created directly in files; and the developers overhauled the file view/sort controls.

Wayland support, which also first landed with 3.20, is expanded to include Wacom tablets, display rotation, and support for the Gnome on-screen keyboard.

The release info is here. ®