The GNOME 49 Alpha “49.alpha” release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September.
Among the many changes found in GNOME 49 Alpha are various packages disabling X11 support by default as the developers move forward with plans to go Wayland-only for GNOME 50. There’s also been a lot of work around using the Rust-based Glycin image loader, various Wayland optimizations, many GNOME Web (Epiphany) improvements, and more.
Some of the GNOME 49 Alpha highlights include:
– The GNOME web browser Epiphany has seen a “major redesign” of the address bar. There have also been many bug fixes and other enhancements to this app known as GNOME Web.
– Gdk-Pixbuf has added a native loader for Android builds and now uses the Glycin loader for SVG files. Glycin is also now treated as the default loader on Linux.
– Glycin now supports saving/encoding images for the BMP, DDS, Farbfeld, GIF, ICO, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, PNM, QOI, TGA, TIFF, and WebP image formats.
– GDM has changed the x11-support default value to false and now disables the X.Org session by default.
– GNOME Backgrounds has added two extra wallpapers for celebrating Pride month.
– GNOME Builder has added Arduino support along with other enhancements to this GNOME-focused IDE.
– GNOME Calculator added support for more features such as an arbitrary root function, permutations and combinations, greatest common divisor and least common multiplier, and more. Plus more currencies are now supported, a backspace button has been added, and there is improved accessibility as well as improved adaptive window handling.
– GNOME Calendar now supports keyboard navigation in more areas and a major memory leak has been fixed.
– GNOME Control Center now builds without X11 support by default.
– GNOME Online Accounts dropped the Windows Live option.
– GNOME Remote Desktop added touch support and other improvements.
– GNOME Session now disables X11 sessions by default.
– GNOME Shell added support for pad dials and other improvements.
– GNOME Software has improved error handling, better memory fragmentation handling, and a rewritten threading model for better performance.
– GNOME Text Editor has improved document filtering for search and improved session save handling.
– GTK now supports multi-plane texture formats with its OpenGL code and brought some fixes to the Wayland code too.
– Libadwaita introduced AdwShortcutsDialog and AdwShortcutLabel along with other refinements.
– Mutter now makes logical monitors more persistent and applies touchpad acceleration profiles on startup.
– A Mutter SDK has been added to Mutter.
– The Nautilus file manager now uses transparency for representing hidden files.
Downloads and more details on the GNOME 49 Alpha release via GNOME.org Discourse.
