After six months of development, the release of the GNOME 42 desktop environment is presented. To quickly evaluate the capabilities of GNOME 42, specialized live builds based on openSUSE and an installation image prepared as part of the GNOME OS initiative are offered. GNOME 42 is also already included in the experimental Fedora 36 builds.
In the new release:
- Global settings for the dark interface style have been implemented, informing applications about the need to enable a dark theme instead of a light one. Dark mode is enabled in the Appearance panel and is supported in most GNOME applications, as well as all stock desktop wallpapers. It is possible for applications to define their own style settings, which can be used, for example, to enable light or dark appearance in individual applications, regardless of the overall system style.
- The interface for creating screenshots has been redesigned, which provides integration with a tool for creating screencasts and provides the ability to create a snapshot of a specific part of the crane or a separate window. After pressing the Print Screen key, a dialog appears allowing you to select the screen area and the mode for saving a single photo or recording a video. You can also use hotkeys for control.
- Many applications have been converted to use GTK 4 and the libadwaita library, which offers ready-made widgets and objects for building applications that comply with the GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) recommendations and can responsively adjust to any screen size. In particular, libadwaita is now used in applications such as Disk Usage Analyzer, To Do, Fonts, Tour, Calendar, Clocks, Software, Characters, Contacts, Weather, Calculator, Sound Recorder, App Icon Preview, Icon Library and Secrets. Many of these applications can now be installed separately in Flatpak format.
- The system style of the user interface has been updated and the GNOME Shell has been visually unified with the new implementation of applications converted to use Libadwaita. The style of symbolic icons has been redesigned.
- The GNOME Settings configurator interface has been updated, which is also now based on libadwaita. The design of the panels has been redesigned to customize the appearance, applications, screen, languages ββand users.
- Two new applications have been added to the recommended default applications for GNOME installations: the Text Editor and the Console terminal emulator. These applications use GTK 4, offer a tab-based interface, support a dark theme, and have their own set of styles that allow you to switch to a light or dark design independently of other applications. Text Editor automatically saves changes to protect you from losing your work due to a crash.
The Console terminal emulator interface is notable for its overlay of scroll bars and size indicator, as well as the change in title color when running as root.
- Web (Epiphany) has enabled hardware acceleration for rendering, smoother scrolling, preparations for the transition to GTK 4, updated the built-in PDF viewer (PDF.js) and added support for using a dark theme.
- The file manager provides the ability to scroll through file paths in the panel, updated icons, and added a new interface for renaming files and directories. File indexing in the Tracker search engine has been significantly improved, memory consumption has been reduced and startup has been accelerated.
- The video player uses OpenGL-based widgets and supports hardware acceleration of video decoding. Improved integration of video playback with the GNOME Shell through the use of the MPRIS standard, which defines tools for remote control of media players. To control playback, you can now use buttons integrated into the notification list.
- In GNOME Boxes, the manager of virtual machines and remote desktops, the design of the settings has been changed and the interface has been adapted to different screen sizes. Improved support for operating systems using UEFI.
- The ability to use the RDP protocol instead of VNC has been added to the tools for remote desktop access. RDP is enabled in the settings in the βSharingβ panel, after which a session with the remote system is established automatically.
- Significantly improved input processing - reduced input delays and increased responsiveness on busy systems. Optimizations are especially noticeable in games and resource-intensive graphics applications.
- The rendering of applications running in full screen mode has been optimized, which, for example, has reduced energy consumption when playing videos in full screen and increased FPS in games.
- The Clutter library and its associated components Cogl, Clutter-GTK and Clutter-GStreamer have been removed from the GNOME SDK. To ensure compatibility with existing extensions, GNOME Shell retains internal copies of Cogl and Clutter. Developers are encouraged to migrate their programs to GTK4, libadwaita and GStreamer.
Source: opennet.ru