GNOME 42.2 Release Improves Support for Flatpak and Snap Apps, Fixes Many Bugs

GNOME 42.2

Jordan Petridis announced today the release of GNOME 42.2 as the second point release to the latest and greatest GNOME 42 desktop environment series.

Coming a little over a month after GNOME 42.1, the GNOME 42.2 point release is here with more bug fixes and other changes to make your GNOME desktop experience more stable, secure, reliable, and ultimately enjoyable.

This second point release in the GNOME 42 desktop environment series fixes focus tracking in Magnifier on Wayland, fixes on-screen keyboard gestures, addresses an issue with the top bar menus on the lock screen, and aligns space-padded times in world clocks in GNOME Shell.

GNOME Software 42.2 received a handful of fixes to better handle various package formats. For example, it improves the UI presentation of Flatpak apps that have complex permissions and fixes the installation of .deb packages through PackageKit. On top of that, it addresses some minor UI glitches on the Updates tab, fixes the “Remove” button for your own app reviews, fixes the installation of langpacks for certain locales, and patches some minor UI glitches when using a dark theme.

GNOME Control Center 42.2 is a big one too, coming with updates to the Applications pane to fix permissions support for Snap apps and a crash that occurred when switching between two apps, the Background pane to ensure the same size of both light and dark previews, as well as the Sharing pane to disable the RDP gsettings key when turning off Remote Desktop Protocol and fix the “Close” button on the Verify Encryption dialog.

Furthermore, the Network pane has been updated as well so that it no longer freezes when closing the wired connection properties with the Esc key, the Sound pane now correctly updates the theme so other apps respond to the change, and the Keyboard pane no longer crashes when resetting all keyboard shortcuts.

The Mutter window and composite manager received fixes for the --replace option, the Night Light feature when the GAMMA_LUT property wasn’t used, an issue with windows stealing focus when GNOME shell has a grab, direct scanout for transparent windows, and the initialization of privacy mode in displays that support it. On top of that, Mutter 42.2 improves picking a window for direct scanout.

Also updated in the GNOME 42.2 point release is the GNOME Calendar app, which now has working undo/redo functionality, the Nautilus file manager, which no longer crashes when opening a new window from the path bar and correctly checks remote filesystems, the Orca screen reader app, which now works much better with Google Docs and no longer fails to speak when clicking on a line, as well as the Native Window Placement and Window List extensions to adjust them to the GNOME Shell 42 changes.

Of course, many other core components received bug fixes and other changes, so check out the full changelog for more details. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNOME-based GNU/Linux distribution for the 42.2 versioned packages and update your installations as soon as possible for a better GNOME desktop experience.

Also today, GNOME Project’s Matthias Clasen announced the release of GNOME 41.7 as the seventh maintenance update to the GNOME 41 desktop environment, which is still supported until September 2022 and used by various GNU/Linux distributions by default, such as Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri). GNOME 41.7 is a small bugfix release that only addresses a few important issues, so check out the changelog for more details.

Last updated 2 years ago

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