News: 0001609859

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

GTK Developers Plot Improvements To Tackle This Year - Possible Opt-In Unstable API

([GNOME] 6 Minutes Ago GTK 2026)


GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings.

This Week in GNOME is out with its newest issue with some of the highlights for the week being:

- The GTK toolkit developers are meeting in Brussels at FOSDEM for another hackfest. Among the items they are looking at over the next year include new SVG rendering code, better accessibility, icons and other assets, enhanced platform support, and other improvements. GTK developers are also weighing whether to introduce an unstable API as an opt-in experimentation feature.

- A new GTK 4.21 development snapshot was also released with GSK shaders now being auto-generated, no longer depending upon librsvg, the GTK Inspector added a heat-map generator, and other improvements.

- GNOME Papers as their modern document viewer now allows for drawing freehand annotations on PDF documents as well as adding text to them.

- GNOME Design as a 2D CAD program for GNOME now supports more commands and other functionality.

- [1]GStreamer 1.28 released this week.

More details on these changes for GNOME this week via [2]This Week in GNOME .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GStreamer-1.28

[2] https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2026/01/twig-234/


One fine day, the bus driver went to the bus garage, started his bus,
and drove off along the route. No problems for the first few stops -- a few
people got on, a few got off, and things went generally well. At the next
stop, however, a big hulk of a guy got on. Six feet eight, built like a
wrestler, arms hanging down to the ground. He glared at the driver and said,
"Big John doesn't pay!" and sat down at the back.
Did I mention that the driver was five feet three, thin, and basically
meek? Well, he was. Naturally, he didn't argue with Big John, but he wasn't
happy about it. Well, the next day the same thing happened -- Big John got on
again, made a show of refusing to pay, and sat down. And the next day, and the
one after that, and so forth. This grated on the bus driver, who started
losing sleep over the way Big John was taking advantage of him. Finally he
could stand it no longer. He signed up for bodybuilding courses, karate, judo,
and all that good stuff. By the end of the summer, he had become quite strong;
what's more, he felt really good about himself.
So on the next Monday, when Big John once again got on the bus
and said "Big John doesn't pay!," the driver stood up, glared back at the
passenger, and screamed, "And why not?"
With a surprised look on his face, Big John replied, "Big John has a
bus pass."