by 
Javier Jardón announced today the general availability of the Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the forthcoming GNOME 42 desktop environment for public testing.
Since GNOME 42 Beta, the devs added the ability to take screenshots of the current window with the Shift+PrntScrn keyboard shortcut, the ability to switch workspaces with Home and End keys in Activities Overview, the ability to cancel ongoing update downloads in GNOME Software when system power is low, and G722 as the preferred codec for SIP calls in the new GNOME Calls app.
GNOME 42 Release Candidate also improves gnome-bluetooth to allow GNOME Shell’s Bluetooth menu to appear when expected and to make the Connect switch available for Bluetooth LE MIDI devices. GNOME Boxes received the ability to recommend the latest operating system releases for download when they’re available in osinfo-db.
On top of that, the Fingerprint dialog apparently makes a comeback in GNOME Control Center’s User Accounts page, GNOME Calendar gets more timezone fixes when importing events, GNOME Shell now features better CSS shadows, and GNOME Builder gets updated templates for C, JavaScript, Python, and Vala, as well as CMake integration improvements.
Last but not least, GNOME Initial Setup now supports GNOME 42’s new dark theme preference via libhandy, GNOME Software now prioritizes full matches in search results and checks for updates when switching from a metered network connection to a non-metered one, and GNOME Maps gets updated OSM POI definitions for OSM editing, tabular numbers for time labels in the public transit itinerary views, and improved set up of the initially selected date in the calendar widget for public transit routing.
Those of you who want to give GNOME 42 Release Candidate a try can use the GNOME OS installer image, which you can install in a virtual machine with EFI support, such as GNOME Boxes from Flathub, or download a rolling-release development distribution like Fedora Rawhide or openSUSE Krypton, which includes the latest packages.
Advanced users can also compile GNOME 42 RC using the official BuildStream project snapshot that they can download from here, or the standalone source packages from here. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t install it on a production machine!
The final release of GNOME 42 is expected later this month on March 23rd, 2022.
Last updated 2 years ago
