There weren't too many changes this week for the GNOME project given the end of year holidays wrapping up and many taking time off. But This Week in GNOME is out with its newest issue to highlight the interesting desktop changes that did get made.

Some of the GNOME improvements to take place this week as noted by This Week in GNOME include:

- The Mutter compositor can now be built without font rendering support in order to avoid the Pango, Harfbuzz, and Fribidi dependencies. If also building Mutter without X11/XWayland support this means being able to drop Cairo as a dependency for that given build configuration.

- Improved recording functionality for the Shortwave Internet radio player.

- Refine is a new app for GNOME to tweak advanced and experimental settings. Refine is an alternative to GNOME Tweaks.

- The Phosh 0.44 Wayland shell for mobile devices brings fixes.

It was a pretty light week in the GNOME space with the end of year holidays wrapping up. More details on the GNOME changes for kicking off 2025 via [1]This Week in GNOME 181 .



[1] https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2025/01/twig-181/