With ya 7.1 available and running for several weeks, the time has come to look to the future. Danielle Foré and her team they are going to start to focus on elementary OS 8.0, a major update that, among other things, will raise the base to that of Ubuntu 24.04 that will arrive in April 2024. Most of the work will be left to this version, and those who are on the current 7 will only receive bug fixes and maybe some back port.
There is no scheduled release date, but it is known that it will arrive after April, probably in June or July 2024. It is likely that we will still have to wait a little longer, since there are drastic changes that they intend to implement, or at least try to do so. One of them is to start using Wayland by default, something that Ubuntu and Fedora already do and Linux Mint has on the roadmap, to give some examples.
elementary OS 8.0 will arrive in mid-2024 with Wayland?
the step to Wayland It is the most ambitious thing about elementary OS 8.0. The idea has been on the table for several years now, during which much of the work has also been done. Right now there is an experimental Wayland session in Pantheon, the graphical environment that elementary uses, but the intention is for it to become the default screen server protocol.
This change will force change Pantheon dock: Plank was written long before many modern APIs and relies on a window mapping library that is incompatible with the Wayland security model and has proven increasingly inaccurate with some isolated applications. A solution is needed in both design and implementation. The work has already begun.
More GTK4
The other most important novelty is that will continue with the transition to GTK4. Some developers, or why not say it, GIMP developers, will be uploading to GTK3 soon, and they say that uploading to GTK4 is a useless effort because the only thing that changes is the interface and many users would not even notice. They may or may not be right, but the truth is that the most modern looks better, and that is another of the objectives sought in elementary OS 8.0.
The plans also include improving the design of the application of the settings and others that they will tell us about in their monthly newsletters.