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The year of the Wayland desktop is almost here and elementary OS is the last distribution to announce plans for switching to Wayland by default with its next major release, elementary OS 8, due out in late 2024.
Founder and CEO of elementary OS, Danielle Foré, shares with us details about the upcoming elementary OS 8 release, which will be based on Canonical’s upcoming long-term supported Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) operating system series.
elementary OS 8 promises some major changes, starting with the move to the Wayland display server protocol by default, joining numerous other popular GNU/Linux distributions that plan to switch to Wayland by default with their future releases, including Linux Mint.
As you’re probably aware, elementary OS uses its own, in-house-built desktop environment called Pantheon. Work already started on porting Pantheon to Wayland, and it looks like a new dock will be made available for the upcoming release to accomplish that, along with a new Wayland-compatible window-matching API.
Apart from the Wayland transition, elementary OS 8 promises more GTK 4 porting for default apps, including the AppCenter and System Settings, a major redesign of the System Settings app, and PipeWire by default.
Other new feature that may (or may not) land in the final release include a new Quick Settings menu for Pantheon à la GNOME desktop, as well as immutability.
The final release of elementary OS 8 is expected sometime in late 2024, a few months after Ubuntu 24.04 LTS’s release on April 25th, as the devs need to do additional work to make their Ubuntu-based distribution as stable as possible and ready for the masses.
No release date was set in stone at the moment of writing.
Last updated 6 months ago
