Arc Menu 47, Popular Gnome Extension Released With New Layout

Arc Menu v47 with a new menu layout called “Tognee” is now available for the download. Arc Menu is a Gnome shell extension designed to replace the standard menu found in Gnome 3.

“Flip Layout Horizontally” and “Searchbar Location” options is now available in traditional panel layouts.

• Plasma 5.19 testing in Groovy Gorilla

  Are you running the development release of Kubuntu Groovy Gorilla 20.10, or wanting to try the daily live ISO?

  Plasma 5.19 has now landed in 20.10 and is available for testing. You can read about the new features and improvements in Plasma 5.19 in the official KDE release announcement.

• GSoC Review 1 - Qt3D based backend for KStars

  In the fourth week of GSoC, I worked on adding support for Skybox which supports the projection modes implemented last week. I also added the grid implementation in KStars based on the prototype.

• GSoC ’ 20 Progress: Week 3 and 4

  The past two weeks did not see as much progress as I would have liked because of my university exams and evaluations. Now, let’s focus on the work that I could do before I got swamped with the academic work and term exams.

  I started the third week by working on drafting a basic QML display of the subtitle model items, like the position of the subtitles in the timeline. I drafted a basic delegate QML model to display the start positions of each subtitle line. Then I began working on integrating the back-end part (which I had mentioned in the previous post) with the basic front-end part (displaying the position of the subtitles).

  In this process of integrating the subtitle model with the QML delegate model, I encountered a few logical errors with my code and some connections with the Subtitle Model which I had completely overlooked. It was also during this time that I realised I had missed out some key functions while writing the subtitle model class.

• Google Summer of Code 2020 – week 4 and 5

  Hi, today I will talk about my week 4 and week 5 and bring some news!

  The last post was short but this one will make up for it, explaining some important bits, and changes, in the structure of mark that changed/improved during the first month of coding in GSoC.

  In week 4, I documented a huge part of the existing code, although there is still a need for some updates. Currently in week 5, I am fixing some bugs of the new logic and I will document the newly created Painter class (more information below), also start developing the logic for text annotation.

• Fractal: Refactoring and the review process

  In this year GSoC, Alejandro is working on Fractal, moving code from the backend to the client, to try to simplify the code used to communicate with the matrix.org server and maybe in the future we can replace fractal-matrix-api with the matrix-rust-sdk. And then we'll have less code in our project to maintain.

  This is a great work, something needed in a project with a technological debt of several years. I created this project to learn Rust, and also I was learning about the matrix protocol during the project build. And other contributors do the same. So we've been building one thing on top another for a lot of years.

  In this kind of community driven projects it's the way to go. For some time we've people interested and developers think about the design and start change some parts or to write new functionality following a new design pattern. But voluntary developers motivation change in time and they left the project and the next one continues the work with a different vision.

On top of an optimization to lower render times and reduce power usage and fixing window culling as another performance optimization, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt also came across another serious optimization for GNOME Shell's icon grid performance.

Due to hundreds of primitives being recopied from the CPU to GPU each frame, the icon grid performance was being slowed down dramatically. Daniel van Vugt has proposed a change to keep labels now pre-rendered on the GPU rather than having all these unnecessary copies made each frame.

Daniel van Vugt of Canonical who has been responsible for many GNOME performance optimizations in recent years has another tantalizing improvement under review.

Recently the Canonical developer has been working on improving the Intel graphics experience on GNOME particularly at 4K after he upgraded his display and was unimpressed by the current level of performance for this default Ubuntu desktop environment.