Endless OS 3.7.0 was released for existing users today, October 21st, 2019.
Note that this is an over-the-air update, only for x86_64 (Intel/AMD) systems. No update will be published for the Endless Mini and no new downloadable images will be published for this release.
GNOME 3.34
In this release most desktop components, including the App Center, were updated to the versions from GNOME 3.34. This brings new features, performance improvements and bug fixes.
New background settings panel
More easily discoverable night light setting
New avatars available
Note that the GNOME Shell (i.e. the Desktop) itself and Evolution (the email client) is still based on GNOME 3.32; new versions based on GNOME 3.34 will be included in a future 3.7 release.
Improved audio and video playback support
The built-in Chromium browser should now support AAC playback by default, without the need to purchase and download additional codecs.
Chromium now also supports accelerated video playback on Intel systems. To make use of that, make sure to install the Intel VAAPI Driver that can be found in the App Center.
Color emoji 
Endless OS now includes color emoji support. 
How well they are supported and how to type them depends on the application (and its programming toolkit):
- In most built-in applications (such as Documents
and Text Editor 
) as well as many applications available in the App Center (such as Geary 
and Gnote 
) you can type emoji by pressing Ctrl + . (period/full-stop). 
- In some other applications – such as Firefox
and GNU Image Manipulation Program 
– you can type emoji by pressing Ctrl + Shift + e. This will display the underlined letter “e” at the cursor. Press Space to open a menu, then select an emoji with the mouse, arrow keys, or by typing its name. 
- Some applications – such as Chrome, Chromium, KeePassXC, LibreOffice, and Endless apps like Encyclopedia – currently have partial or no support displaying color emoji.
Updated hardware support
The underlying operating system software has been updated in order to support the latest PC hardware and fix some hardware compatibility issues. This includes an update to Linux v5.3.
Many HP laptops will no longer rotate their screen based on accelerometer readings, which were frequently found to be incorrectly interpreted by the software.
Some modern PC platforms have a BIOS option called “RAID mode” or “Intel RST Optane”, typically set by default, which would previously cause any NVMe disks to be unavailable to Endless. Endless can now work with these disks regardless of BIOS settings.
Other Improvements and Changes
- Updated Chromium. We’ve updated to Chromium 77.0.3865.120 to bring the latest security fixes to Endless’ built-in web browser.
- New Disk Usage Analyser app included. The GNOME Disk Usage Analyser (i.e. Baobab) is now included as part of the OS. This utility can be used to access disk usage information through a graphical interface.
- Flatpak and OSTree updates to keep compatibility with latest features and bug fixes.
- Improvements to First Boot Experience. With the rebase to GNOME 3.34, the First Boot Experience gained support for auto-generated default avatars based on the user’s name, easier avatar picker including support to select a photo as avatar, and various other improvements.
- Network and device files (e.g. content shared over the network from Windows machines or on Android handsets) are now accessible as local content. This should allow for example to open a media file in VLC from a remote Windows network drive (SMB filesystem) using the file manager, or import photos from an Android phone (MTP filesystem) using the Photos app.
- Updated Chinese-Japanese-Korean font support. We have switched our inbuilt CJK font to Noto CJK.
Known Issues
- Progress bar for app installs in the App Center is not accurate.