GNOME 3.12: And so GNOME 3.12 has arrived with updates all around. Over here at Codescaling, we’re looking forward to the improvements to HiDPI display support . We had been spoiled by Apple’s fairly smooth switch to HiDPI support but on Linux and Windows its all, surprisingly, a work in progress. Our GNOME desktop on a HiDPI dispay brings a range of font sizes to the screen, only some of which are appropriate. (Google Chrome has its own special mix of tiny tabs, chunky (too chunky) bookmark bar and microscopic (mostly) main window so its not just GNOME that has issues). Thats why we’re using HiDPI as our new proxy for up-to-date-ness. Back at GNOME 3.12, there’s also some nice additions like the popover menus for a flatter UI and more work on making Applications more managable entities. Unfortunately, all this won’t be making it into Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS because it feature froze just over a month ago in what could be described as un-cadence. For the curious, there’s already a FreeBSD with GNOME 3.12 VM available. There is also a more traditional Fedora based GNOME 3.12 live image available to download as an ISO.
Systemd 212: An update of bugfixes for the future dominant ‘init’ system in systemd 212. My favourite feature is at the top of the list… make sure that the screen has minimal brightness when restoring settings to stop people rebooting into a black screen. There’s also been work done on timers including the ability to persist timers to disk so they can be used to start processes over a longer span of time and through reboots.
Comment: Steady improvements with GNOME, systemd and Wayland make me hopeful that there will emerge a good end user Linux distro with a solid desktop designed for a general population but configurable for power users – GNOME 3 is well on the way there, but there’s no distro that seems ready to host such a combo as its primary environment beyond Fedora and that’s not aimed at the general populous. Agree/Disagree? Why not try our comments section below?
Node package popularity: It’s the little things that count, and one little enhancement just made to the Node package manager site sets out to make package searching easier by ordering results by popularity – though on testing here at Codescaling, the algorithm will need a bit more work as it seems packages with no ratings and no downloads rise to the top of the list. Still, its good to see work being done on the NPM site, that isn’t security fixes, after the somewhat contraversial creation of NPM Inc . The backend was already getting attention
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog