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Javier Jardón Cabezas of the GNOME Release Team announced today via an email announcement the general availability for public testing of the Release Candidate milestone for the upcoming GNOME 41 desktop environment.
GNOME 41 is the next major release of the acclaimed desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, and it promises many new features, updated and new apps, as well as numerous improvements and bug fixes.
The Release Candidate (RC) milestone comes hot on the heels of the beta release announced at the end of August, and fixes a bug in the new Calls app that prevented SIP from working when using multiple network interfaces and adds last minute touches around SIP account management and its UI.
The Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser has been updated with the ability to ask users if they want to terminate an unresponsive page and a fix for a crash that occurred when using the Clear All passwords action. Also, Epiphany now no longer uses the system scrollbars with the Adwaita theme, nor the captive portal helper under elementary OS’ Pantheon desktop.
GDM (GNOME Display Manager) comes with improved fallback to the X.Org session at login screen and the ability to reuse the virtual terminal on logout, GNOME Boxes now has the ability to use VNC for boxes when SPICE is not available, and GNOME Control Center’s User Accounts page now features an improved parental controls behavior.
Also updated in the GNOME 41 Release Candidate is the GNOME Maps app, which now features up-to-date OSM POI types for editing, refined usage of the shopping cart icon in search results to be used only for supermarket-like places, and refreshed screenshots to reflect the switch to osm.org’s tiles system scrollbars when using the Adwaita theme.
Some last minute touchups for GNOME Music’s new design are present as well, along with async improvements and a fix for duplicated playlist song removal. The GNOME Software package manager also got some improvements, such as support for the add-ons categories, the ability to sort new and updated apps by release date on the Category page, tweaked context tiles and dialogs, and better Details page for non-desktop apps.
Under the hood, GNOME 41 Release Candidate improves auto-rotation support, enables the power-saver profile when low on battery, dims the screen quicker by default, generalizes laptop battery notifications, refactors battery notifications for external devices, optimizes the rendering of full-screen zoom, improves launch animations when leaving the Activities Overview, and adds the ability to authorize devices after the screen has been locked.
Those of you who want to take the Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming GNOME 41 desktop environment for a test drive can use the GNOME OS installer image, the official BuildStream project snapshot, or the source packages. However, keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, so don’t use it for any production work. The final GNOME 41 release is expected on September 22nd, 2021.
Last updated 3 years ago
