GNOME 3.38.5 Released with Support for Handling Monitor Changes During Screencasts

GNOME 3.38.5

The GNOME Project announced today through Michael Catanzaro the general availability of GNOME 3.38.5 as the fifth point release to the latest stable GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series.

Coming a month after the GNOME 3.38.4 point release, which probably most of you are already using on your Linux distros, the GNOME 3.38.5 update is here with more bug fixes and various improvements to make the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series more stable, secure, and reliable.

Among the changes included in this point release, there’s support for handling monitor changes during screencasts in Mutter, the ability to set the resolution for Epson scanners in Simple Scan, better support for Firefox Sync in Epiphany, and improved freezes when switching workspaces.

This being a bugfix release, numerous issues and crashes were patched, such as newly opened X11 windows being invisible in the Activities Overview, frame timings causing X11 clients to get stuck, full-screen apps blocking the workspace switch animation, stuck grab after failed area screenshots, stuck Polkit dialog when using non-password authentication, and a glitch after dragging the window preview from a second monitor.

GNOME 3.38.5 also adds missing X11 fallback icons, changes the icon choosing logic to prefer image-data or or image-path hint over app-icon in notifications, fixes overaggressive popup blocking and loss of session state on window close with unresponsive web process in Epiphany, and disables double-buffered shadow buffering in Mutter. Of course, numerous language translations have been updated as well.

GNOME 3.38 is still the latest version of the popular Linux desktop environment, used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions, and it will be supported with maintenance updates for a few more months after the release of GNOME 40, which will be announced tomorrow, March 24th, 2021.

If your Linux distro is shipping with the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment, you should update to the GNOME 3.38.5 point release as soon as the packages arrive in the stable software repositories. Linux OS maintainers can compile GNOME 3.38.5 using the official BuildStream project snapshot or the source tarballs.

Last updated 3 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com