Fractal 5.rc1 is the first release candidate since the rewrite of Fractal to take advantage of GTK 4 and the Matrix Rust SDK, an effort that started in March 2021.
The most notable changes since Fractal 5.beta2, that was released 2 months ago, are:
- An awesome new look thanks to libadwaita 1.4
- Read receipts tracking has been largely improved thanks to some upstream work in the Matrix Rust SDK
- The same upstream work allows to have much better tracking of the activity in the rooms list
- The full lists of read receipts and reactions on messages can be perused in popovers
- Destructive actions like removing a message or leaving a room now ask for confirmation
- The most noticeable performance issues and memory leaks were fixed to make Fractal run as smoothly as ever
This list is far from complete and hides more enhancements, including bug fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.
It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.
As the version implies, if we don’t find any major bug in the next 2 weeks, our next release should be the long-awaited Fractal 5 stable version! Now is the time to update translations!
In the meantime, if you want to fix bugs, implement new features, or any other kind of contribution, you can get inspired by taking a look at our issues tracker on GitLab. Any help is greatly appreciated!