The GNOME 50 Alpha “50.alpha” release is now available for testing ahead of this open-source desktop’s official release in March.
A big change affecting multiple components of the GNOME 50 desktop is the removal of the X11 session support. With GNOME 50, only the Wayland session support remains although via XWayland is still the ability to run X11 clients.
Some of the biggest GNOME 50 Alpha highlights include:
– GNOME Mutter removes the X11 back-end support with GNOME 50 officially killing off its X11 session support but retaiing XWayland support for X11 games/apps.
– Glycin added XBM and XPM image loading support for that safe Rust-based image loading/thumbnailing library.
– Improved animations, performance enhancements, fixing dozens of memory leaks, and more for the GNOME Calendar.
– GNOME Control Center adds the “winever” to keywords for getting the about page to better match Microsoft Windows version behavior.
– GNOME Initial Setup will now try using run0 first if it’s available rather than pkexec.
– Improved dark theme styling for the GNOME Text Editor.
– GNOME Foundry has major infrastructure improvements for IDE development and a complete debugger implementation.
– gdk-pixbuf with Glycin now makes compressed SVGZ images work as well as support for saving AVIF images.
– Special sessions like initial-setup are now loaded from .desktop files rather than hard-coded into the GDM display manager.
– GDM 50.alpha also “entirely removed” its X11 support.
– GDM added a new [email protected] to make it easier starting a headless graphical session such as for RDP use.
– Many bug fixes for the GNOME Web browser (Epiphany).
– at-spi2-core now using dbus-broker by default with its Meson build configuration.
– Gtk 4.21.4 now has GtkSvg as a much more complete SVG renderer.
– The Nautilus file manager has improved thumbnail loading, reduced memory usage, and other enhancements.
More details on tonight’s GNOME 50 Alpha release via the GNOME.org announcement.
