Debuting as a new development release today was XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 as this portal front-end service for Flatpak sandboxed apps and other desktop containment frameworks. The XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 milestone is exposing new and expanded portal capabilities for dealing with various hardware devices and APIs.
First up the XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 release introduces the new USB portal. The USB portal allows applications with relevant permissions to enumerate and access specific USB devices on the system. The USB portal serves as a “middleman” between sandboxed applications and the actual USB devices on the system. This USB portal comes thnaks to the Sovereign Tech Fund funding. This portal provides device filtering, permission handling, enumerating device support, device acquisition and release, and related functionality intended for sandboxed Flatpak apps.
XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 also adds the Notification v2 portal as an updated notification implementation. The Notification v2 support has been work for about two years and allows for notifications to support playing sounds or vibrating on notifications, persistent notifications that will remain at the top of the tray, standardized hints, standardized actions, grouping support for similar notifications, rich content in notifications like progress bars or images, and other features compared to the prior notifications support. This Notifications Portal v2 support was started by GNOME developers for making the notification support by sandboxed apps more useful on the Linux desktop.
The XDG Desktop Portal also adds a new “SchemeSupported” method to the OpenURI portal so that apps can know ahead of time if the host system can deal with a particular scheme. Additionally the v1.19.1 release improves its icon validator, improves other portals, and brings documentation improvements and bug fixes.
More details on the XDG Desktop Portal 1.19.1 release via GitHub.
