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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- GNOME 49 will be available on Sept. 17.
- The latest release switches out some default apps.
- This new GNOME adds just the right amount of polish.
GNOME is a Linux desktop environment that you either love or hate. I’ve used GNOME and GNOME-based desktops for years and have always fallen on the side of “love. ” With each new release, I always find a feature or two (or a bit of extra polish) that makes me smile.
The release of GNOME 49 is no different. Although there might not be any game-changing features for this release (I’m guessing the developers are holding out until the big 5-0), there’s just enough to make it a worthy upgrade from 48.
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GNOME 49 will officially be released on Sept. 17 and will hopefully make it to your distribution of choice soon after.
If you’re curious as to what’s coming, read on.
Say goodbye to X11 (sort of)
With the release of GNOME 49, the X11 session has been officially disabled. That doesn’t mean your distribution will leave it disabled, as the GNOME team has made it possible for distro maintainers to enable X11 support.
Also: 5 quick tweaks make your GNOME desktop so much easier to use
Enjoy X11 while you can, because the team plans on stripping all X11 code from the desktop for the 50th release.
GNOME Shell is now a Wayland-only desktop environment. For those who use applications that have yet to add Wayland support, fret not, as Xwayland will continue to work, so those apps will still run.
Mutter matters
Mutter is GNOME’s window manager, so it’s responsible for managing, you guessed it, windows. GNOME 49 includes quite a lot of improvements to the window manager, such as:
- Support for 10, 12, and 16-bit software decoding formats
- Improved factional scaling.
- Touchpad acceleration profile enabled at login.
- Support for ICC profiles.
- Separate speeds for trackpoint and mouse.
- Support for the pointer warp protocol.
Files, files, files
The GNOME file manager, Files (aka Nautilus), includes a few improvements. One of the better additions is the pill-type search option toggles, which are rather Android-like. Those pills make it much easier to refine your searches.
If you like to filter your searches, it’s much easier now.
Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Another nice touch is that hidden files appear with a bit of transparency, so they are easier to find.
Other additions/improvements include:
- Batch rename dialog is adaptive
- A more modern app chooser.
- Local mounts are now sorted by device name.
- It’s now possible to copy network address in the panel
Default apps
The GNOME developers have made a slight change to some of the default apps. For example, Totem has been the default GNOME video player for years, but has been replaced by Showtime. Showtime is a fairly basic application, but it’s much more reliable than Totem.
Also: The top 6 GNOME extensions I install first
The long-in-the-tooth Evince document viewer has been replaced by Papers, which is a fork of Evince that was totally rebuilt using Rust, which means it’s much faster than Evince.
Outside of those two changes, the remaining default apps are still the same.
Core apps
GNOME ships with several core apps, such as Web (browser), Calendar, Software, Snapshot, Maps, Weather, Text Editor, Pyxis (terminal), and Connections (remote desktop). Each of these have seen improvements, such as:
- Calendar now enjoys a hideable sidebar and an adaptable UI, based on window size.
- Connections can now forward multitouch input from a client to a remote host.
- Maps now includes point-of-interest search for both vegan and vegetarian restaurants. Given I’m vegan, that’s good news.
- Text Editor now has improved session saving and document filtering.
- Ptyxis gets a new menu for searching across containers and profiles.
- Snapshot gets hardware-accelerated video encoding.
- Software now performs much better.
- Weather gets improved keyboard shortcuts.
- Web gets a new bookmark editing mode, better ad blocking, and inline completion for the address bar. You’ll also get built-in support for hardware security keys.
GNOME Shell
GNOME Shell gets plenty of changes that come together to make the desktop more polished than ever. For example, you’ll now find a media controller widget for the lockscreen, as well as the addition of shutdown and restart buttons. The Do Not Disturb toggle is now found in the Quick Settings menu, so it’s easier to access.
If you use Do Not Disturb, it’s now easier to access.
Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Another really cool feature is the ability to change the brightness on a per-monitor basis.
On top of those changes, you’ll find the following additions:
- Improved animations.
- Screenshots/screencasts notifications are now grouped.
- Battery charging limits are now more obvious.
- Display brightness change in 5% increments.
All-in-all, GNOME 49 looks to add just the right amount of polish to an already amazing desktop environment. Although I see this as more of a stepping stone to GNOME 50, 49 should be an improvement over 48, which means you’ll definitely want to upgrade when it becomes available.
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