Thanks to [1]funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund , GNOME developers have been working on greater USB permissions/controls for Flatpak-based Linux applications.

Georges Stavracas has been working on the full-featured USB portal for Flatpaks and provided a status update as part of This Week In GNOME. Within the latest Flatpak development version is now support for listing enumerable and blocked USB devices as a first step toward a proper USB portal. Flatpak is working toward the infrastructure so apps can request access to devices without opening holes in the sandbox. App store reviewers will also be able to review which USB permissions that apps will be requesting.

Also thanks to Sovereign Tech Fund money, the notifications portal is seeing improvements and now supports a variety of new features from notification sounds to other changes.

This Week In GNOME also mentions there are a number of significant performance improvements coming to Mutter for monitors connected directly to secondary GPUs. Shortwave 4.0 also released this week as the GNOME-aligned Internet radio player.

More details on the interesting GNOME developments this week via [2]This Week In GNOME .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/STF-Two-Years-24.9M-USD

[2] https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2024/10/twig-170/