{"id":3795,"date":"2019-09-03T11:42:03","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T10:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3795"},"modified":"2019-09-03T12:15:30","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T11:15:30","slug":"monthly-news-august-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3795","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News \u2013 August 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi everyone,<\/p>\n

I hope you enjoyed the release of Linux Mint 19.2. It all went really well here, we got very good feedback during the BETA phase and that allowed us to fix a significant number of bugs. The stable release was very well received. It was great to see you happy, and we really enjoyed your comments, in particular about the speed and resource usage improvements in Cinnamon.<\/p>\n

With the stable release behind us, the upgrade path opened and the new packages ported towards LMDE 3, we started work on Linux Mint 19.3. This next release is planned for Christmas, so our development cycle is quite short and we need to move fast.<\/p>\n

Let’s have a look at some of the upcoming improvements.<\/p>\n

Language Settings<\/strong><\/p>\n

Along with the locale and the region, the Language settings tool will let you set your time format.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

HiDPI Support<\/strong><\/p>\n

HiDPI is supported in Cinnamon and in MATE and it’s getting better with each new release. A couple of icons and images were still blurry in HiDPI in Linux Mint 19.2. Here’s what we’re fixing:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Flags in the Language settings<\/li>\n
  • Flags in the Software Sources tool<\/li>\n
  • Flags in the Cinnamon screensaver<\/li>\n
  • Theme preview images in the Cinnamon theme settings<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    All of these will be crisp in Linux Mint 19.3.<\/p>\n

    System Tray Icons<\/strong><\/p>\n

    We also looked at Gtk.StatusIcon, which is the technology used by the system tray icons. They’re not only blurry in HiDPI, they have a significant number of problems:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • They were designed with 16px icons in mind<\/li>\n
    • They are rendered by the application, not by the applet<\/li>\n
    • They rely on obsolete technology such as Gtk.Plug and Gtk.Socket which won’t be around in the future or compatible with what’s coming next (Gtk4, Wayland etc..)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      This is something that isn’t supported by GNOME and which we’re lucky to still have in GTK3. Without exageration I think it’s quite a miracle we even managed to have this in Cinnamon.<\/p>\n

      The way this works is also\u00a0 extremely buggy. The icon widget is rendered by the application, so the panel applet has no control over it. It can’t resize it properly, it can’t parse its icon name or switch the icon to symbolic, and depending on how the app sets its icon, when and how, we can sometimes end up with rendering issues… invisible icons, cropped icons, wrongly sized icons or icons which can’t get bigger than 16px. It’s a mess and it’s been working really poorly since the start of Cinnamon (think of Pidgin as an example) and also quite poorly in other desktops (take Skype for instance). So for a while now, we knew we needed to support tray icons, but we also knew Gtk.StatusIcon was going to die eventually and just didn’t work well enough as it was.<\/p>\n

      Ubuntu developed an interesting alternative called AppIndicator which solved these issues but which also introduced new ones. Indicators don’t support some of the features available with Gtk.StatusIcons, so moving applications towards them means redesigning the way we use them and making compromises we don’t want to make. For instance, we like to show and hide the Update Manager window by left-clicking on its tray icon. We also want to be able to build complex menus (MPRIS controls for instance) within our applications, so it was important we kept these features and the ability for applications to popup their own menu.<\/p>\n

      We wrote an alternative to Gtk.StatusIcon called XApp.StatusIcon which similarly to AppIndicator uses dbus to pass the information over to applets and let them render the tray icon, tooltip and optional label natively. This means no more rendering issues, and crisp icons in all sizes.<\/p>\n

      We also passed click events from the applet over dbus back to the app. This means the app can connect to events and react to buttons being pressed and\/or released any way it wants.<\/p>\n

      We made a standalone applet and a Cinnamon applet to get started and we’ll make applets for MATE and Xfce next.<\/p>\n