The first beta release of the GNOME 41 desktop environment has been announced, marking the freezing of changes related to the user interface and API. The official release is scheduled for September 22, 2021. Experimental builds for testing GNOME 41 have been prepared by the GNOME OS project.
Recall that GNOME has switched to a new version numbering system, where instead of 3.40, release 40.0 was published in the spring, followed by work on the new significant branch 41.x. Odd numbers are no longer associated with test releases, for which alpha, beta, and rc labels are now used.
The changes in GNOME 41 include:
- The notification system has added support for categories.
- The GNOME Calls interface for making calls has been included, which, in addition to making calls through cellular operators, supports the SIP protocol and VoIP calls.
- New Cellular and Multitasking panels have been added to the GNOME Control Center for managing connections through cellular operators and selecting multitasking modes. An option to disable animations has been introduced.
- The Eiphany browser has updated the built-in PDF viewer PDF.js and added an ad blocker for YouTube, implemented using the AdGuard script.
- The GDM display manager now allows starting sessions based on Wayland, even if the login screen is running on X.Org. Wayland sessions are permitted for systems with NVIDIA GPUs.
- The calendar scheduler now supports importing events and opening ICS files. A new tooltip with event information has been proposed.
- In gnome-disk, LUKS2 is used for encryption. A dialog has been added for configuring the filesystem owner.
- The initial setup wizard has restored the dialog for connecting to third-party repositories.
- The interface design of GNOME Music has been updated.
- GNOME Shell now supports launching X11 programs using Xwayland on systems that do not use systemd for session management.
- In the Nautilus file manager, the dialog for managing compression has been redesigned, and the ability to create password-protected ZIP archives has been added.
- GNOME Boxes now supports audio playback from environments connected via VNC.
- The calculator interface has been completely redesigned, now automatically adapting to screen size on mobile devices.
Source: opennet.ru
