Next-gen packages have their strengths. Among them, I would highlight that they can work on any Linux distribution and that they have everything necessary, including dependencies, to function after installation. The bad thing is that they do not respect some things, such as the design of our desktop. When we open one of these applications, we usually see something that is out of tune, although this depends on the desktop in which they were thinking at the time of designing it, but GNOME 42 Prepare something that will minimize the feeling of visual lack of consistency a bit.
GNOME 41 It has been released less than two weeks ago, and that means that there are still about six months to go before the release of the next version, but also that we are going to begin to know details about GNOME 42. As we read in this article by Alex Mikhaylenko, the next version of GNOME will include a dark style setting for the entire system.
New dark style setting in GNOME 42
As Mihkaylenko explains, the idea is to do something similar to what has been done in elementary OS:
The idea is more or less the same as elementary OS does: there is a system preference, a tri-state with values: no-preference, prefer-dark, prefer-light. All three are just suggestions; the applications are free to follow them or not, as appropriate. The no-preference and prefer-dark values are exposed in the configuration, while the prefer-light value is reserved for future use.
Among the most interesting that we can read in Alex's article we have this phrase: «Being on the portal also means it is accessible to Flatpak apps without opening any sandbox holes«, Which, in other words, means that will work in sandboxed applications without thereby losing security. The Snap and AppImage packages have not been mentioned, but they are probably also supported by the upcoming GNOME 42 tweak.
GNOME 42 will be released approximately in March 2022, and in these six months we will get to know the rest of the news that the next version of the popular desktop will introduce.