On April 25, 2025, the GNOME project shared significant updates on various initiatives and improvements made over the week from April 18 to April 25, showcasing the ongoing commitment to enhancing the user experience through a series of updates across its core apps and libraries.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Software

In the realm of software management, Philip Withnall announced some noteworthy developments in the realm of XML parsing within GNOME Software. Owen Chiaventone undertook a profile-guided optimization of XML parsing, which is a crucial process that occurs every time the repository metadata updates. This optimization yielded several enhancements that are expected to improve the overall performance of the GNOME software ecosystem. For further details, interested users can refer to the issue posted on GitLab sunniva announced the long-awaited release of Stockpile version 0.5.0, marking its transition to the GNOME 48 runtime. This update greatly enhances the user experience with a revamped start screen and introduces functionality for recovering corrupted data, a feature that users had been eagerly anticipating.

Pipeline

Pipeline, a platform for following favorite video creators, has seen multiple updates, specifically versions 2.2.0 to 2.2.2 released within the week. The latest versions enable Pipeline to utilize all Piped instances configured in settings concurrently, resulting in a remarkable sevenfold increase in speed for querying feeds when multiple instances are set up. Furthermore, the management of Piped instance lists is now automated, as Pipeline will download a list of operational instances with each startup, enhancing reliability and reducing the need for users to manually locate functional instances. A bug fix addressing an issue where different videos would replace each other in the 'Watch Later' listwhen they were uploaded simultaneouslyhas also been implemented.

Flare

Flare, the chat application that allows users to communicate with friends on Signal, has also seen significant updates with the release of version 0.16.0, which introduces initial support for receiving stickers, enriching the messaging experience.

Miscellaneous Updates

Philip Withnall also reported another notable addition, where Maximiliano has implemented support for storing GitLab tokens in libsecret. This feature will facilitate users employing gitlab-changelog to write NEWS entries for their releases more securely, further enhancing the development workflow.

Thats all for this week! Stay tuned for more updates next week, and dont forget to join us at #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!