GNOME 3.38.4 Released with More GNOME Shell, Mutter, and Wayland Improvements

GNOME 3.38.4

Matthias Clasen announced today the general availability of GNOME 3.38.4 as the fourth maintenance update to the latest GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series.

Coming three weeks after GNOME 3.38.3, this fourth point release is here to introduce more bug fixes, translation updates, and small improvements to keep the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series as stable and reliable as possible.

Among the noteworthy changes implemented in GNOME 3.38.4, there’s better HiDPI support on Wayland for the Evince document viewer, Flatpak improvements in the GNOME Boxes virtual machine manager, as well as improved login screen accessibility in GNOME Shell.

GNOME Shell also received various bug fixes that address the disappearing app grid issue, improve the ability to take screenshots of unredirected full-screen windows on X11, improve storing of VPN secrets, and patch visual glitches that appeared during overview transitions.

Mutter, GNOME’s window and composite manager, also received a bit of attention during the GNOME 3.38.4 development cycle to enable it to set Xrandr as primary XWayland output, disable CRTCs if there’s no monitor attached, and address a few crashes and bugs.

In related news, GTK 4.1 was also pushed during this cycle as the first major update to GTK 4 with better GL support, optimized gradient shaders, better Wayland support for KWin, better support for small screens, and many other goodies.

If you’re using the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment on your GNU/Linux distribution, keep an eye on the stable software repositories for the 3.38.4 packages and update as soon as possible for a better experience.

Advanced Linux users and Linux OS maintainers who want to compile the GNOME 3.38.4 release themselves, can use the official BuildStream project snapshot, which they can download from here, or the individual source packages.

The next point release in the GNOME 3.38 release cycle is GNOME 3.38.5, which is expected to hit the streets in late March, very close to the launch of the next major release of the desktop environment, GNOME 40, due out on March 24th, 2021.

Last updated 3 years ago

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