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The GNOME Project announced today the general availability for public testing of the Release Candidate (RC) development version of the upcoming GNOME 44 desktop environment series ahead of the final release on March 22nd, 2023.
GNOME 44 Release Candidate is here to reimplement elementary OS support and revert the “add preference to set new tab page” change in the Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser, allows the creation of virtual machines without selecting an Osinfo operating system entry in GNOME Boxes, and improve the state of switchers throughout the GNOME Control Center app.
It also improves Flatpak support for the GNOME Disks app, updates the About You page in the GNOME Initial Setup app to make it clear that you can choose a different avatar, add nightly builds for AArch64 (ARM64) for the GNOME Maps app, and cleans up the Shortcuts menu and decreases memory usage in Songs View in the GNOME Music app.
GNOME Online Accounts was also improved to ensure expired Kerberos tickets are re-acquired when resuming from suspend, handle multiple credential caches per identity, correctly solve Nextcloud account addresses, and update CalDAV/CardDAV OwnCloud endpoints.
Furthermore, GNOME 44 Release Candidate adds the time of the original item to thumbnails in the GNOME Photos app, defaults to sleep the session after 15 minutes, drops GTK for systray support and the compositor process, and exposes GtkIconTheme replacement to extensions.
Last but not least, the Release Candidate updates the Mutter window and composite manager to remove legacy OpenGL driver support, improve the default scale factor selection, handle all X11 window title fallbacks, manage KMS updates more asynchronously, remove support for window shading, restore zero-copy fast path for Xwayland fullscreen windows, add experimental development tool for HDR modes, implement a fractional_scale protocol for Wayland, and improve XWayland RandR emulation compatibility.
Of course, numerous bugs were fixed across several other apps and core components, and various translations have been updated. Check out the full changelog for more details.
The GNOME 44 desktop environment also comes with many other exciting features like a GTK4 port of the Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser, a grid view for the GTK file chooser, support for 64px icon size in Nautilus (Files)’s grid view, a new Bluetooth submenu in Quick Settings, as well as the ability to disable Settings search results in the Shell.
GNOME 44 Release Candidate is available for public testing using the official GNOME OS installer image, which can be installed in a virtual machine with EFI support, such as the GNOME Boxes version available on Flathub, but should also work on bare metal.
However, please remember that this is a pre-release version intended for testing purposes only. As mentioned before, the final release of the GNOME 44 desktop environment is expected to be officially announced by the GNOME Project on March 22nd, 2023.
Last updated 1 year ago
