I am a faithful user of KDE software. I am faithful because I use it on my main laptop, on the less powerful one from where I am writing this article and on the desktop system that I use on the Raspberry Pi, but recently it crossed my mind to stop being it after having tested the v40 from the famous desk. The new gestures attract a lot of attention, but companies like Canonical or Manjaro did not adopt it at the time because everything was very immature. Today, the project has launched GNOME 40.2 to make things better.
And no, it's not that GNOME did a bad job with this update; the problem is that many extensions were not working, and GTK4 had also been released a short time before, so not everything was consistent. Manjaro has it prepared and will make it available to Stable users soon, while those who prefer Fedora will take advantage of the tweaks introduced in GNOME 40.2 when the new packages are released.
Highlights of GNOME 40.2
As we read in the change list, GNOME 40.2 introduces new features like these:
- Improvements in the tactile integration of actions in the app grid.
- Screencasting improvements on the fractional scale.
- Improved the workspace marker on the Activities minimap.
- Improved fingerprint authentication.
- Support for animated backgrounds configured through the wallpapers portal.
- Improved performance during Night Light transition on NVIDIA GPUs.
- Support for the met.no weather forecast provider in the GNOME Calendar.
- Ability for the view of SMART attributes on GNOME Disks to expand vertically.
- Ability for the GNOME Configuration daemon to read / dev / rfkill on newer kernels,
- You can now report the actual battery percentage when full.
- The GNOME Software Center has improved in aspects such as that it now comes with better support for Flatpak applications.
- Improved automatic download of pending updates.
- Improvements to the Adwaita icon theme.
- Fixes for Epiphany memory issues and GNOME Calendar.
- Support has been added for the RAR v5.
- Fixed issue where GDM was running 100% CPU at startup, and the same with a similar issue in Gedit.
Now available, soon in your distribution ... if you don't use Ubuntu
GNOME 40.2 has been officially launched, so it is already in the hands of anyone who wants to download it. The problem is that most major distributions have wanted to wait, so the best ways to test it as soon as possible is by using Fedora or Rolling Release systems like Arch Linux or Manjaro on their Unstable branch. Ubuntu users will have to wait a bit longer, until October, and will probably make the jump straight to GNOME 41.