GNOME 50.rc was christened today as the release candidate for the GNOME 50 desktop.
GNOME 50 stable is due out in two weeks on 18 March and GNOME 50.rc is the last tagged release before that all important milestone. GNOME 50 will be the default desktop for the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44.
Some of the last minute changes in GNOME 50.rc include:
– GNOME Remote Desktop now supports explicit DMA buffer synchronization. It also enables zero-copy Vulkan and VA-API rendering by default.
– Session save/restore support in GNOME Session has been delayed to a future release of GNOME.
– Mutter brings better NVIDIA performance, SDR-Native, and better HDR support.
– The GDM display manager has changed its remote desktop handling to accept a hostname. GDM also landed a minor performance optimization for $GDM_DEBUG_JSON_REQUESTS.
– Glycin’s image-rs no longer assumes JPEGs are YCbCr encoded to now support grayscale and YCCK too.
– GNOME Calendar now supports using arrow keys to navigate the Month view for enhanced accessibility.
– GNOME Control Center now behaves better when UPower is not present on the system.
Plus there are many bug fixes, translation updates, memory leak fixes, and more. The full details on the GNOME 50 release candidate via GNOME.org.
