While the winter holidays are approaching so far it hasn't led to any reduced effort in the GNOME camp. In fact, fresh off the €1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, there are several new exciting initiatives moving forward along with other ongoing enhancements driven by GNOME developers.

Earlier this month the GNOME Foundation received €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to help modernize the GNOME platform and enhance tooling and accessibility. That's already paying off with new work underway around systemd-homed integration for home encryption and other features. Some of this week's highlights for GNOME include:

- Support was added to GNOME's AccountService for systemd-homed as part of the home encryption integration. This is their first step towards a nice user experience around home encryption.

- Drag and drop of folders will now work with sandboxed applications thanks to XDG Desktop Portal work, among other portal work.

- There's new work on enhancing the shell and compositor performance along with adding Tracy profiler integration.

- New improvements on the way around hardware-accelerated screencasting and improving the Linux Bluetooth stack.

- Support for the OpenGL KHR_robustness extension in Mutter is being worked on to help the GNOME session recover from GPU driver crashes.

- The Fractal Matrix messaging app saw the Fractal 5 release as a full rewrite that now makes use of GTK 4, libadwaita, and the Matrix Rust SDK.

More details on these latest GNOME efforts can be found via This Week In GNOME .