Gregory's ServerAlright, I’ve finally done a new #GNOME Shell Mobile release! Time for a little thread about the updates.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile/-/tree/46-mobile-0?ref_type=tags
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23 comments
IMO the coolest new feature: There’s a new auto brightness implementation now. It’s much fancier than what the existing one does and actually tries to adjust for physical constraints and human perception. The service requires device-specific configuration to work, specifically it needs two calibration tables: One from PWM values for the backlight to Nits, and one from ambient lux values to Nits. I’ve so far added the data for the devices I own: Surface Pro 5, Pinephone Pro, and OnePlus 6. For Android devices, this calibration was already done by the manufacturers, and we can simply reuse the tables from Android. I'm planning to do a little write-up on how to (crudely) do own measurements and get the data for your devices. The auto brightness is implemented as a dbusService for gnome-shell, it should be fairly easy to move into out a separate project. I’m hoping that we can start an effort to have a DE independent daemon that does the heavy lifting for auto brightness. There‘s also a new module for handling power states and events. This means we get to do a lot more nice things: - A proper fade out animation when turning off the screen. Another big one: We now detect the phone turning on while in a pocket by reading the proximity sensor. This allows us to avoid turning on the screen, or even go back to suspend while in a pocket. Quick note for packagers: For all this to work, a few things had to be moved out of g-s-d and into gnome-shell, so the project now depends on a gnome-settings-daemon fork. Also these things are using systemd APIs, so systemd becomes a hard dependency too. Luckily #postmarketos is moving to adapt it! The OSK has gotten quite a few changes: - We now show UI feedback when pressing a key, this should allow for a lot faster typing. - The layouts of various non-latin keyboards were improved. If you’re using one of those, please help by testing and suggesting improvements! - Caps lock is triggered by double tap instead of long press - The suggestions from ibus typing booster are now displayed nicely - The extended terminal keyboard now has key-repeat enabled for the arrow keys - Another thing that was requested by a lot of people: There’s now a gesture to show the OSK for apps which don’t support wl-text-input (eg. chromium): A double tap on the bottom bar will open the keyboard. - And finally: The german keyboard layout now has umlauts (ö,ä, and ü letters). Kind of an opinionated change because I'm used to it being that way. If this is something people are against, please file issues :) And a bunch of smaller things that seem noteworthy: - The PIN unlock has an improved gesture and should be a lot more reliable. No more random failures to unlock the device! - The quick settings overlay got a fresh look again. @tbernard was unhappy about the giant overlay, so we came up with a different solution. - The WiFi Captive Portal dialog is now mobile friendly and fits the screen. If you want to give the new version a try, you probably want to use #postmarketos with systemd on the phone of your choice. Note that the new gnome-shell-mobile release hasn't landed in their repos yet, and the systemd integration is also still work-in-progress and somewhat rough. I'm sure the team would greatly appreciate help there! You can put together a systemd build by following the steps described here: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Systemd @verdre @camelCaseNick Double tap can be executed pretty much as quickly as you want, with long press you're forced to wait. And when using an OSK that wait time can feel quite long.  @verdre https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3409 it would be nice if you apply that here :) |
Things are now based on the upstream gnome-46 branch rather than the main branch. This means the project will be more aligned with the GNOME update cycle and potential breakage on main won’t affect us.
Of course that rebase on top of GNOME 46 means we get all the great work that went into GNOME Shell and Mutter 46.