The GNOME 49 beta release is out this Friday evening as the next stepping stone on the path to GNOME 49 in September. Making the GNOME 49 Beta release even more notable is that it’s the 28th birthday of GNOME.
It was on this day in 1997 that Miguel de Icaza announced the start of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 49 beta shipped today with many last minute feature changes in addition to countless bug fixes and translation updates.
– The GNOME Foundry is in its v1.0 beta state as “an IDE in a box” with command line tooling.
– The GDM display manager has switched to using dynamic users for greeter sessions, which enables systemd-based session management on the greeter and removes the dependency on dbus-daemon.
– The Glycin image library now supports saving JPEG-XL images and CICP support for HEIC and AVIF formats.
– GNOME Initial Setup brings increased reliance on systemd.
– GNOME Session is no longer started via shell script but is all now baked into C code. There is also enhanced systemd integration.
– GNOME Shell brings media controls to the lock screen.
– GNOME Shell also adds restart/shutdown support to the lock screen.
– Mutter now supports the Wayland pointer warp protocol.
– Mutter Wayland ICC profile support and backlight improvements.
– The Nautilus file manager has redesigned the search popover.
– GNOME Snapshot now prefers H.264/MP4 format when possible. There is also now support for hardware video encoding.
– Many GTK bug fixes.
– The new default wallpapers have landed for GNOME 49. Here’s the light version:
Downloads and more details on the GNOME 49 Beta via GNOME.org.
