GNOME Makes Progress On GPU-Accelerated Screencasting, systemd-homed Home Encryption

GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support.

Jonas Dreßler's work on hardware encoding for screencasts is two years in the making and allows for using VA-API encoding, fallbacks to NVIDIA NVENC encoding, and also V4L2-based hardware support for ARM devices. That work remains pending via this merge request. According to This Week In GNOME, it will still hopefully land for GNOME 46 due out in March.

There's also work on the new gestures API support for the GNOME desktop.

While likely not being a late add for GNOME 46, there's also ongoing work around improving fractional scaling support for GNOME and XWayland, ongoing Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) work for GNOME, and fixing NVIDIA GPU issues with WebKitGTK. Some of the other GNOME work this week includes GNOME Online Accounts porting to GTK4, notification enhancements, and more. On the home directory encryption side there's been GNOME Initial Setup support for systemd-homed, block directories in systemd support, and the systemd-homed environments is now at parity to legacy users within the GNOME Control Center.

More details on the GNOME development activities this week via This Week In GNOME.