14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME 3.20 is still a couple of months away from a stable release, but it looks like more features are being added, like the new support for airplane mode keys.
If you’ve ever flown, you know that passengers are requested to turn off any kind of electronic apparatus so that it doesn’t interfere with the plane's avionics. As much as this is an improbable scenario, it’s still taken very seriously, and many hardware makers and companies have implemented an airplane mode for devices to turn off any kind of radios emissions.
People still want to use their laptops, phones, and tablets, and activating the airplane mode allows them to do this. It’s also a good way of maximizing battery life when you need to, so you don’t have to be in a plane to use this particular setting. Now, the GNOME developers are also working to get this feature ready for the 3.20 branch, which is scheduled to arrive in a couple of months.
Airplane mode in GNOME 3.20
It looks like people have been asking for this particular feature for quite some time, but only now have the GNOME devs gotten around to it.
“As we were working on audio jack notifications, and were wondering whether the type of notification we'd pop up, in this case, could be reused in other cases, I encountered a feature request that could now be solved easily with the rfkill D-Bus service we added to gnome-settings-daemon for the 3.10 release. If you have keyboard buttons on your laptop to enable or disable Bluetooth, or Airplane mode, you can now use them,” developer Bastien Nocera writes on this blog.
From the looks of it, users won’t have to do anything special. Using the integrated functions on laptops should be enough, although it would be cool if we could get this functions on regular PCs, with a switch.
GNOME 3.20 is expected to arrive on March 23, 2016.