Ahead of the GNOME 49 release candidate being announced in the days ahead, today marked the “49.rc” tagging of the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor components. Some last-minute user-facing changes have landed along with other improvements for polishing ahead of next month’s GNOME 49 stable release.
GNOME 49 is shaping up very nicely as the latest iteration of this Wayland-focused Linux desktop. The late GNOME Shell changes for the “49.rc” release include:
– Tweaking some animations.
– Fix connecting to WPA(2) Enterprise networks.
– Improving legacy tray icon support.
– Improved styling of media notifications on the lock screen. Here’s an example from the merge request:
– One year in the making, an indicator is added to the GNOME Shell for when battery charging limits are in place. The battery charging limits are intended to help in ensure laptop battery longevity.
– Various crash fixes and memory leak fixes.
More details on the GNOME Shell 49.rc release via GNOME GitLab.
Also released this Sunday is the GNOME Mutter 49.rc compositor release. Highlights there include:
– Support for monitor ICC profiles.
– Adding a custom service client to associate a default window tag when running Wayland clients.
– Advertising Broadcast RGB support.
– Wayland wl_seat v10 support.
– Now using the Glycin Rust library for loading background images.
– Improve picking fractional scaling factors.
– Adding color calibration support for monitors to the D-Bus API of Mutter.
– Allowing the cursor to move at the maximum refresh rate with Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) displays.
– Revamping initial Wayland window configuration handling.
– Using extended sRGB for blending by default.
– Various crash fixes.
More details on the GNOME Mutter 49.rc changes via its tag on GNOME.org GitLab.
GNOME 49.rc should be out imminently while the GNOME 49.0 stable release is due for release on 17 September. GNOME 49 in turn will be found by default in the likes of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43.
