News

Settings for everything, and a round of fixes

Thanks to everyone who tried the Openbox edition and said what bugged them. This update is mostly that list, plus a much bigger Settings app.

Settings

lensOS Settings (Super + I) now covers the whole desktop: the bar, the dock, desktop icons and windows, effects, displays and graphics, sound, power and the lid, keyboard and mouse, the terminal, notifications, screenshots, default apps and a few extras. Everything applies as you click. The same settings work from a terminal with lensos-config, so they fit in dotfiles. See Settings.

The bar

Four styles: the floating pills, one floating bar, a full-width bar, or no background at all, just the widgets on the wallpaper. Put it at the top or bottom, make it compact or large, set how see-through it is, and add, move and remove widgets: weather, Bluetooth, brightness, temperature, the window title, do not disturb, night light, power mode, a screenshot button and more.

Fixed

  • The terminal flashed when you pressed Enter: that was the cursor trail. It’s off now, and a switch in Settings → Terminal if you liked it.
  • Open Terminal Here in Files asked for a “TerminalEmulator”: it opens your terminal now.
  • Passwords show * for each character when sudo or lens update asks for one.
  • Volume could climb past 100% and distort, with no sign of where it was. The keys stop at 100% (Settings → Sound can allow more) and show a small popup with the level; brightness too.
  • Laptops now lock before they sleep, with a new lock screen over a blurred picture of your desktop. Closing the lid, the power button (it opens the power menu instead of shutting down), idle sleep and low-battery warnings are all in Settings → Power. NVIDIA laptops get the driver’s sleep services, so they wake to a working screen.
  • Screenshots go to the clipboard as well as Pictures (Super + Shift + S for an area).
  • Discord doesn’t show your pointer when you share your screen on X11. Settings → Extras can draw it into the picture, or install Discord (Vesktop) from Settings → Apps & tools.

New

  • Desktop icons, if you want them (Settings → Desktop & windows).
  • Monitor settings: resolution, refresh rate, rotation and arrangement, with 15 seconds to keep them, remembered for each set of screens.
  • Colours from your wallpaper: Settings → Appearance picks three accents that suit the picture.
  • Clipboard history (Super + V), an emoji picker (Super + .), night light and quarter-screen snapping (Super + Alt + arrows).
  • lens undo goes back to before the last update.
  • hyfetch for the terminal greeting, with the lensOS lens in your flag’s colours.
  • About shows much more about your computer, and copies it for bug reports.

The installer

It looks new (the aperture behind glass), can join Wi-Fi without leaving it, and has a fourth way to install: choose partitions yourself, with GParted or KDE Partition Manager a click away. It also recognises Macs with Apple’s T2 chip and sets the boot options they need; full T2 support needs drivers that aren’t in lensOS’s kernel yet.

Later the same day

A second update, from what testers ran into next:

  • Settings has a new look: an icon for every page, a search box (Ctrl + F), settings in tidy groups, and proper switches.
  • Windows on the bar: a new widget, on by default, shows your open windows as their apps’ icons. Click one to bring it back, click the one you’re using to minimize it, middle-click to close it. Settings → Bar can add the apps’ names.
  • Opening Settings again brought up a second window. Now it brings back the one that’s open, and the dock’s Settings icon shows and hides it like any other app.
  • The dock sometimes wouldn’t come back after logging in: it started a few pixels from the screen edge, so pointing at the edge missed it. It now checks where it landed and fixes itself.