Yesterday, August 15, GNOME fulfilled 25 years. They reviewed their history, but the celebration was missing something that arrived hours later: GNOME 43 beta was released late at night in Spain. It is usually a month before the Fedora and Ubuntu releases when the project releases a new stable version, so the betas have to arrive about two months before to allow time.
GNOME 43 beta was released with the latest news that they have introduced in GKT4 and libadwaita, two of the components that “make up” the desktop. They have also taken the opportunity to improve everything a bit, and here is a list of some of the changes introduced in this beta of the next version of GNOME.
Some new features in GNOME 43
- Epiphany has removed PDF.js, added several WebExtensions features, and other updates.
- The GNOME calls app starts faster, and scrolling works better on histories that exceed 100 entries.
- Support for dark color scheme with DConf Editor.
- GJS is shipping several new JavaScript features since SpiderMonkey 102.
- New wallpapers.
- GNOME Console has been ported to GTK 4 and libdwaita, along with other improvements.
- WWAN 5G connection support to Cellular area of GNOME Control Center. There is also now support for privacy screen settings from the GNOME Control Center.
- GNOME Initial Setup has been ported to GTK 4 and libdwaita.
- GNOME logs have been ported to GTK 4.
- User interface updates and other improvements to GNOME software.
- Many performance improvements around loading documents in the GNOME Text Editor. There are also improvements to desktop integration and improvements to user interface recoloring, among others.
- The Nautilus file manager has seen improvements to main window elements at smaller screen sizes, changes to plugins, modernization of the properties window, and other tweaks.
- GNOME Mutter improvements including direct scan improvements, high resolution scroll wheel support, and single pixel buffer support in Wayland.
- Improvements to GNOME Shell, including better overview animation performance, improved application grid navigation, and improved on-screen keyboard.
- More information in notes from this release.
Available mid-September
The best way to test all the news is by downloading the ISO of the pseudo-operating system GNOME OS, available at this link. Logically, it can be installed in a virtual machine, but there may be things that do not work, such as touch panel gestures. GNOME 43 will arrive in the form of a stable version at mid September.