FOSS Roundup #3 - Back at it with Xubuntu

It’s time for another Weekly (okay, almost weekly) FOSS Roundup! Last week, I was busy rolling out my new website. If you haven’t checked it out yet, head over to bluesabre.org and take a look! This week has been relatively quiet overall, but some important library and application updates remain.

The GTK Clutter library has been retired

Clutter has been an integral component of GTK and GNOME for many years. It enables hardware-accelerated features such as video and animated interfaces. Mugshot uses it for the camera feed and was once Parole Media Player‘s preferred video display solution. As of GNOME 42, it will be archived and receive no future updates.

OBS added official Flatpak support

OBS Studio 27.2 added official Flatpak support! OBS has been available as a Flatpak and Snap for several years now. With this release, the Flatpak version comes closer to being a standard and supported way of installing and using OBS.

libinput 1.20.0 was released with various improvements

libinput, the X- and Wayland-compatible input library, arrived this week with improvements to high-resolution wheel scrolling, better support for drawing tablets, and better recognition of joysticks and gamepads (which it doesn’t manage).

Early support for GTK 4 and libhandy in Greybird

Simon popped in early this week and started adding support for GTK 4 and libhandy to Greybird. This will make numerous apps, including GNOME Software, look a lot better for Xubuntu 22.04. If you want to give it a spin, check out the Pull Request below!

I’m back to daily driving Xubuntu

After nearly a year-long hiatus, I’m back to using and developing on Xubuntu 22.04! Getting up and running wasn’t without its hiccups, though. Hardware support (multi-touch gestures and Bluetooth) and GRUB gave me headaches.

What I’m working on…

With my new site out of the way and my Xubuntu development machine back up and running, I’ll be focused on Xubuntu for the next week. I hope to get some traction on the LTS wallpaper contest (more info soon). I’m also planning to knock out some more Xubuntu documentation updates.

Thanks for reading!

I asked on Twitter what the most important thing you’re looking forward to or would like to be fixed in time for Xubuntu 22.04. Feel free to chime in, or if you’re really eager, start contributing! You can find details on how to get started on xubuntu.org/contribute.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, consider sending me a tip! I’ve added links to GitHub Sponsors, Ko-Fi, and Patreon to the Donate page on my website.

See you next week with some more Linux and Open Source news!