A few moments ago, the project that develops the most used desktop in Linux announced the launch of GNOME 45. Its code name is “Riga” in honor of the work done by the organizers of this year's GUADEC. Among the new features, there is at least one that is obvious, so much so that it is impossible not to notice when an operating system is updated to the new version. GNOME 45 will be the desktop version used by Ubuntu 23.10, and that is where it has been tested in the preliminary phase for some time.
The change that is seen as soon as you upload to GNOME 45 is that of Activities indicator. Until GNOME 44 You could see the text "Activities", but the project had been looking for something that would better tell what it was for for some time. The result is what you have below: there will be a point for each of the activities, but the one we are in will be a line. When moving from one activity to another you will be accompanied by an animation that can be seen in the original article about this release.
What's new in GNOME 45
Continuing with the indicators, one has been added for the camera and will be in the top bar. When the camera is being used, we will see an icon in the system tray, and it will join those that were already there. According to what they tell us, it is an important addition in security, since we will be able to know at all times when the camera is being used, and if it turns on automatically, something that many of the big technology companies fear, as has been proven in some photos of their computers. , we will know.
El performance search has received some love in this version of the desktop. It has been brought to many applications, including Software, Clocks, Files and Calculator. Other applications have been added, such as a new image viewer, completely adaptive, a new camera app, much more modern and reminiscent of mobile device cameras, and applications such as Settings or Files have been updated with many improvements.
General changes
Other new features of the general desktop include:
- Keyboard backlight quick settings: The quick settings menu now includes a button to control the keyboard backlight.
- Efficient video playback and recording: Where possible, GNOME will now use hardware resources when playing videos and creating screen recordings. This is faster and consumes less power.
- New Quick Settings keyboard shortcut: You can now use the new Super+S key combination to open and close the Quick Settings menu.
- Updated pointer visuals: GNOME pointers (aka cursors) have a great new look for GNOME 45.
- Light System Style: GNOME has a new option to give the system a light interface style, as opposed to the default dark look. It can be enabled using an extension or from the command line with gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme prefer-light. Further integration is being investigated for future versions.
- New Wallpapers: Two nice new images have been added to the GNOME wallpaper collection.
- Wayland support for Input Leap: This provides a software implementation of the KVM-switch functionality, allowing you to control multiple computers from a single keyboard and mouse. GNOME 45 allows you to use this software with modern Wayland sessions.
- Smoother pointer movement: Performance improvements mean the pointer will move smoothly even when the computer is busy.
New Circle Apps
GNOME 45 has officially welcomed several applications that have become part of its circle:
- Telegraph, a Morse code translator.
- Cartridges, a game launcher compatible with Steam, Lutris, Heroic, etc.
- Ear Tag, a tag editor for audio files.
- Paper Clip, a PDF metadata editor.
- Forge Sparks, a notifier app for Github, Gitea and Forgejo.
- Impression, which writes disk images to removable drives.
The GNOME 45 code is available at your GitLab. The best way to try its new features is with GNOME OS, its own pseudo-operating system. In the coming weeks, Fedora 39 and Ubuntu 23.10, the two most popular distros to use the latest versions of GNOME, will arrive with it. It will reach the rest of the operating systems within a period that will depend on its development philosophy.