After six months of development, the release of the GNOME 49 desktop environment has been published. For a quick assessment of GNOME 49's capabilities, specialized Live builds based on openSUSE and an installation image prepared as part of the GNOME OS initiative are offered. GNOME 49 is also already included in experimental builds of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43.
In the new release:
- The Showtime media player is used by default, which will now be supplied under the name GNOME Video Player instead of the Totem (GNOME Videos) player. The Showtime application features a minimalist interface that is displayed over the content and hidden during playback. It supports standard controls, fullscreen mode, playback speed adjustment, subtitle display, switching between audio tracks and subtitle options, screen rotation, and screenshot creation. Unlike Totem, which uses GTK 3, Showtime employs GTK 4 and Libadwaita libraries.
- A new document viewer named Papers is included, replacing Evince. Papers is a fork of Evince, created last year with the aim of significantly modernizing the codebase. Key differences of Papers include porting to the GTK4 library, using Rust for development, substantial redesign, performance improvements, and integrating tools for digitally signing documents. Functionally, Papers is similar to Evince and also allows viewing, searching, and annotating documents in PDF, DjVu, TIFF formats, and comic archive formats (CBR, CBT, CBZ, CB7). However, support for the DVI format and the Windows platform has been discontinued in Papers, many internal widgets from Evince have been replaced with standard GTK widgets, the background process papersd is no longer used, and a separate annotation tools panel has been removed.
- The interface of the calendar-scheduler has been reorganized to automatically adapt to the available screen space. For more comfortable use on small screens and in a window mosaic layout, manual hiding of the sidebar has been added. Support has been implemented for exporting the event list to ICS format files. The visual style has been changed and the readability of event information enhanced.
- In the Epiphany web browser, the ad-blocking tools have been enhanced, and the ability to connect regional block lists has been added. The address bar has been improved with support for input completion suggestions and a button to mute audio. In narrow windows, the address bar moves down the screen. Smart card support has been expanded. A separate password management dialog has been added. The capability to terminate or uninstall a web application via the menu has been included. When searching on a page, options for case-sensitive searches and whole word searches have been added. A new bookmark editing mode has been implemented. OpenSearch specification support has been added for integrating search engines.
- In the GNOME Maps application, metro and train station icons have been localized. Interactive markers with street names and house numbers have been implemented; clicking them shows information about the location. Account settings now display avatars from OpenStreetMap profiles.
- The performance of the GNOME Software application manager has been optimized. Memory consumption has been significantly reduced and the data parsing process from large repositories has been sped up, which accelerates the work with flatpak directories such as Flathub.
- In the compositor server Mutter has improved color management and HDR support. It now allows for rendering desktop wallpapers with a 16-bit color depth per channel. The performance of color management operations in the image loading backend (Glycin) has been enhanced. A new wallpaper catalog specifically designed for systems with displays supporting an extended range of brightness (HDR) has been added.
- Tools for remote desktop work have been expanded. It is now possible to add additional virtual monitors to a GNOME remote desktop session to recreate multi-monitor configurations even if the original system lacks extra physical monitors. Support for multitouch event redirection from the client to the remote GNOME session has been added for use with touchscreen devices on the client side. Relative coordinate support for mouse movement tracking has been added (demanded in gaming).
- The lock screen now features media playback controls, allowing you to stop playback or change tracks without unlocking the screen.
- A new menu has been added to the login screen for controlling accessibility features.
- The Do Not Disturb toggle has been moved from the notifications list to the quick settings panel.
- The shopping cart implementation has been improved.
- A device connection indication for a stationary power source has been implemented, independent of battery charge status. This change allows you to identify when the device is running on mains power even if charging is paused due to battery saver mode.
- Screen brightness can now be adjusted through quick settings when HDR is enabled.
- A setting has been added ('gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver restart-enabled') that allows the reboot and shutdown buttons to be used on the system lock screen.
- Sandbox isolation for image loading in GTK applications has been enabled.
- The game Mahjongg and the dictionary application Wordbook have been added to the GNOME Circle collection.
- The Mutter SDK (Mutter Development Kit) has been adopted, providing a new way to interact with the Mutter compositor and GNOME Shell. The Mutter SDK allows you to run a nested instance of GNOME Shell inside a GTK application for easier testing of Mutter and GNOME Shell during development. Nested instances of Mutter and GNOME Shell output information to a virtual monitor tied to the current user session, displayed in the application window and supporting touch screen event emulation. An option '--sdk' has been added to launch separate instances in mutter and gnome-shell.
- The application development toolkit (GNOME SDK) includes the blueprint-compiler, allowing the use of Blueprint markup to define application interfaces. Blueprint simplifies interface creation using the GTK4 library and features a straightforward declarative syntax that mirrors the GTK widget model, supporting type patterns, types, and handlers. Unlike GTK's ui-file format, Blueprint does not use XML markup, which is seen as overloaded and cumbersome for manual editing.
- The dependency on systemd has been strengthened. GDM utilizes the userdb infrastructure provided by systemd. The implementation of a custom service manager, which was used in gnome-session as a fallback handler to launch GNOME services in environments without systemd, has been removed.
- The Libadwaita library has been updated to version 1.8, which introduces a new class, AdwShortcutsDialog, implementing a dialog for navigating available keyboard shortcuts.
- The GTK library has been updated to version 4.20, which implements support for YUV color formats, reworks the rendering of symbolic icons, adds support for CSS media queries for color schemes, and enhances support for Wayland.
- By default, the X11 session is disabled. Support for X11 is turned off in gnome-session, gdm, mutter, and gnome-shell, but it can be enabled during the build process if desired. The ability to run applications using X11 is maintained through xwayland.
Source: opennet.ru
