Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 13 to March 20.

This week we released GNOME 50!

This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, including improved parental controls, many accessibility enhancements, expanded document annotation capabilities, calendar updates, and much more! See the GNOME 50 release notes and developer notes for more information.

Readers who have been following this site will already be aware of some of the new features. If you’d like to follow the development of GNOME 51 (Fall 2026), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 reports

I’ve added a chapter about accessibility to the gtk4-rs book . While I researched the topic beforehand and tested all examples with a screenreader, I would still appreciated additional feedback from people experienced with accessibility.

Eyedropper ↗

Pick and format colors.

FineFindus reports

Eyedropper 2.2.0 is out now, bringing support for color picking without having the application open. It also now supports RGB in decimal notation and improves support for systems without a proper portal setup.

As always, you can download the latest release from Flathub .

Third Party Projects

JumpLink announces

The TypeScript type definitions generator ts-for-gir v4.0.0-beta.41 is out, and the big news is that we now have browsable API documentation for GJS TypeScript bindings, live at https://gjsify.github.io/docs/ . As a bonus, the same work also greatly improved the inline TypeScript documentation, hover docs in your editor are now much richer and more complete.

Anton Isaiev reports

RustConn is a GTK4/libadwaita connection manager for SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, Telnet, Serial, Kubernetes, and Zero Trust protocols. Core protocols use embedded Rust implementations - no external dependencies required.

The 0.10.x series brings 8 new features and a major platform upgrade:

New features:

• MOSH protocol support with predict mode, UDP port range, and server binary path
• Session recording in scriptreplay-compatible format with per-connection toggle and sensitive output sanitization
• Text highlighting rules - regex-based pattern matching with customizable colors, per-connection and global
• Ad-hoc broadcast - send keystrokes to multiple terminals simultaneously
• Smart Folders - dynamic connection grouping by protocol, tags, or host glob pattern
• Script credentials - resolve passwords from external commands with a Test button
• Per-connection terminal theming - background, foreground, and cursor color overrides
• CSV import/export with auto column mapping and configurable delimiter

Platform changes:

• GTK-rs bindings upgraded to gtk4 0.11, libadwaita 0.9, vte4 0.10
• Flatpak runtime bumped to GNOME 50 with VTE 0.80
• Migrated to AdwSpinner, AdwShortcutsDialog, AdwSwitchRow, and AdwWrapBox (cfg-gated)
• FreeRDP 3.24.0 bundled in Flatpak - external RDP works out of the box on Wayland
• rdp file association - double-click to open and connect
• Split view now works with all VTE-based protocols

0.10.2 is a follow-up with 11 bug fixes for session recording, MOSH dispatch, highlight rules wiring, picocom detection in Flatpak, sidebar overflow, and RDP error messages.

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Quadrapassel ↗

Fit falling blocks together.

Will Warner reports

Quadrapassel 50.0 has been released! This release has a lot of improvements for controls and polishes the app. Here is what’s new:

• Made game view and preview exactly fit the blocks
• Improved game controller support
• Stopped duplicate keyboard events
• Replaced the libcanberra sound engine
• Fixed many small bugs and stylistic issues

You can get Quadrapassel on Flathub .

Documentation

Jan-Willem says

This week Java was added to the programming languages section on developer.gnome.org and many of the code examples were translated to Java.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!