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While you’re enjoying your brand new elementary OS 6.1 installation, the elementary folks have already kicked off the development cycle of the next major release coming later this year, elementary OS 7.
Elementary Co-founder and CXO Cassidy James Blaede talks in a recent blog post about some of the features and enhancements that may or may not land in the final elementary OS 7 release.
First things first, the developer revealed the fact that elementary OS 7 is being built on top of the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series, which is also under heavy development over at Canonical’s labs.
Being based on an Ubuntu LTS series, means that the next major elementary OS release could also be supported for several years with minor point releases that bring new technologies and the latest package versions from upstream, as well as the fact that it will be built on top of a rock-solid platform.
While Canonical decided to avoid GTK4 apps as much as possible in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, the elementary devs are doing the opposite, promising that “elementary OS 7 will come with GTK4 natively.” In addition, they are also adopting the libadwaita library, which is designed to provide a dark style preference to most of the GTK4 apps.
elementary OS 7 also promises improved power management and battery settings features to let you configure the system for power saver, balanced, or performance mode, along with a new battery health/status section for laptop users.
Two other major changes might be coming to elementary OS with the next major release, namely automatic updates in AppCenter and a completely revamped Music app written from the ground up in GTK4.
Last but not least, Cassidy James Blaede revealed the fact that the elementary team are considering an “OS upgrade” feature for the elementary OS 7 release, finally allowing users to upgrade between major versions without downloading a new ISO image, but it is in very early stage and may not land in the final release.
Good news for early adopters and bleeding-edge users as elementary OS 7 daily builds are now available for grabs via the project’s Early Access initiative. The final release date and codename are yet to be revealed, so stay tuned on this space for more news about the upcoming major elementary OS release.
Last updated 2 years ago
