GNOME Added Many New Features This Year Amid Foundation Woes

The GNOME desktop environment had a vibrant 2024 with landing many new features, continuing to refine its (X)Wayland integration, apps like Ptyxis as a modern terminal taking off, and more. From the software side 2024 was great for GNOME while over on the GNOME Foundation side they had to deal with coping from running a recent deficit and also their executive director departing after less than one year.

For those wanting to reminisce over some of the software milestones for GNOME over the course of the year, below is a look at the most popular GNOME news stories on Phoronix for 2024. Enjoy!

GNOME Merges RDP Graphical Remote Login Support
After the merge request was open since August of 2022, merged today is support within the GNOME Remote Desktop code for handling graphical remote log-ins.

GNOME 46 Alpha Released With Many Improvements
If you happen to be impacted by snow storms today or otherwise have extra time on your hands this weekend, GNOME 46 Alpha is now available for testing this latest desktop environment that will be going head-to-head with KDE Plasma 6.0 later this quarter.

GNOME Network Displays Adds Support For Chromecast & Miracast MICE Protocols
GNOME Network Displays is the software that allows streaming your GNOME desktop to WiFi Display devices using PipeWire. Last week GNOME Network Displays 0.91 was released with some big improvements to this software.

GNOME Prompt Becomes Ptyxis
The GNOME Prompt terminal emulator in-development by Christian Hergert with a focus on GPU-acceleration and being a very speedy and beautiful terminal option has been renamed to Ptyxis.

New GNOME Mutter Code Prepares Fractional Scaling For XWayland
A merge request was opened this week for plumbing fractional scaling support for XWayland clients running on the GNOME Mutter compositor.

GNOME 47 Can Now Be Built With X11 Support Disabled
Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell. Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled — optionally — without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

GNOME Shell & Mutter Broke Their Good Faith With Ubuntu
GNOME Shell and Mutter had been covered by Ubuntu’s GNOME MicroReleaseException “MRE” policy that allows for new point releases to ship rather easily as stable updates to existing Ubuntu Linux releases. But breaking the camel’s back is GNOME 46.1 shipping explicit sync support. Due to landing a “significant new feature” into a point release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter are no longer covered by this exception.

GNOME OS Continues Seeing New Features, New GNOME App for Viewing 3D Models
GNOME developers continue to be quite busy this summer from enhancing their desktop with more security and accessibility features to further crafting GNOME OS.

GNOME Shell & Mutter 46 Alpha Released
In preparing for the GNOME 46 Alpha release, this morning the “46.alpha” builds of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published.

Linux Distributions Now Encouraged To Build GTK With Vulkan
Last week I wrote about GTK landing their new unified GPU renderer and as part of that the Vulkan API support is set to be enabled by default. Linux distribution vendors are being encouraged moving forward to indeed ship with the GTK Vulkan support enabled, so we’ll be seeing more Vulkan API use on the Linux desktop with OpenGL slowly fading away.

GNOME Shell’s Layout Being Improved For Smaller Displays
There’s been a lot of improvements coming about in the GNOME desktop space thanks to the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund and other initiatives toward GNOME 47.

GNOME Shell Accent Color Support Merged For GNOME 47
In addition to Mutter seeing Wayland DRM lease protocol support merged, another long-in-development patch series hit GNOME Shell this morning: accent color support!

GNOME Improving Integration With systemd-homed, Mockups For An OS Installer
In addition to KDE’s busy week of development work, GNOME developers have also been busy working on features like improving the systemd-homed integration and beginning to work on mock-ups for an OS installer.

Mutter Merges Experimental Variable Refresh Rate For GNOME 46
It’s happened! After three years in the making, the GNOME desktop Variable Refresh Rate “VRR” support has been merged after obtaining a feature freeze exception for GNOME 46 due out later in March.

GNOME’s Key Rack & Phosh Mobile Wayland Shell See New Releases
This Week in GNOME is out with their newest issue to detail changes made by various GNOME components over the first few days of July.

GNOME Triple Buffering May Need To Be Re-Engineered – Helping NVIDIA Performance
The long-in-development GNOME triple buffering support that is patched into the Ubuntu and Debian builds and available for years in patch form might need to undergo a redesign. That’s to better accommodate the NVIDIA Linux driver and likely help other non-Mesa graphics drivers too.

GNOME 47 Alpha Released With Accent Color Support & Wayland-Only Build Option
The alpha release of GNOME 47 is now available for testing and comes with a number of shiny new features for this big open-source desktop update due out in September.

Variable Refresh Rate “VRR” Support Comes Down To The Wire For GNOME 46
Today marks the UI, feature, and API/ABI freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop ahead of its stable release on 16 March. One feature coming down to the wire that looks like it may not make it — unfortunately — is the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) integration.

GNOME Mutter 46 Beta A Win For Gamers & VM Users, Other Last Minute Changes Too
GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor today issued their GNOME 46 Beta releases with some notable changes ahead of the API/ABI and feature freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop due for release in March.

GNOME 46 Beta Released – Mutter Supporting Direct Scanout For Cropped/Scaled Surfaces
The GNOME 46 beta is out today for featuring the latest fixes and last-minute enhancements to this open-source desktop environment update due out in March.

GNOME Papers Document Viewer Making Progress As GTK4-Based Evince Fork
GNOME’s longtime document viewer, Evince, was recently forked as GNOME Papers and saw its first release a few weeks back. This new GNOME document viewer has been ported from GTK3 to GTK4 and also brings an improved user interface and other refinements.

GNOME Took In $556k Last Year While Spending $675.9k
The GNOME Foundation today published their 2023 annual report that outlines their accomplishments as well as a look at the finances.

GNOME’s Variable Refresh Rate “VRR” Support Continues Coming Together
For the GNOME desktop among the technologies that will hopefully mature into good shape this year are high dynamic range (HDR) display support as well as variable refresh rate (VRR). When it comes to the VRR support there’s been more Mutter progress made in this effort.

GNOME Foundation To Focus On Fundraising After Years Running A Deficit
After several years of the GNOME Foundation running at a deficit (loss), the GNOME Foundation is going to be driving a push for greater fundraising.

GNOME Foundation Executive Director Departing After Less Than One Year
It was just announced at the end of last year that Holly Million was named as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. After a little more than a half-year, this previous outsider to GNOME announced she will be stepping down from her post. A new interim executive director will be starting while the search begins for a permanent replacement.