GNOME 42: more upstream, some breakage

April 19, 20221 min. read

Last week the newest GNOME release, 42, was merged into Alpine Linux. This release comes with lots of improvements! Most notably for the phone ecosystem, many core apps were upgraded to use GTK4 and libadwaita. This means that the adaptability is greatly improved, and the number of patches needed downstream continues shrinking. Unfortunately, it also means that some improvements which were not pushed upstream are now lost, as we were forced to drop them. Additionally, those apps upgraded to GTK4 saw a complete UI overhaul and may have seen very little testing in narrow displays. Therefore, some breakage is certainly expected. Please report regressions, together with screenshots in pma#1479

Also have in mind that to get the whole GNOME 42 experience, an # apk upgrade -a is necessary to replace the dropped forks by the packages from alpine.