GNOME News Archives

GNOME's Mutter compositor has been going through some code restructuring and preparations for being able to build it without any X11 dependencies at all, for those wanting a legacy-free/X11-free GNOME desktop experience that would also forego any XWayland support.

NetworkManager 1.38 is now available for this widely-used software on the Linux desktop (and elsewhere) for managing wired and wireless network interfaces.

GNOME developer Chris Davis has laid out plans for at least some of the work items he and other open-source developers hope to accomplish for GNOME 43 and future releases.

GNOME 42 is out today as the latest half-year update for this widely-used, open-source desktop environment.

We are a little more than one week away from the official GNOME 42.0 desktop release and packages are beginning to prepare their "v42.0" releases.

Ahead of next month's GNOME 42.0 desktop debut, today marks the GNOME 42 Beta (or "42.beta" as they prefer) and this also initiates the start of the user-interface, API, and feature freeze for this six month update.

The Clutter toolkit -- as the OpenGL-based graphics library for rendering UIs that dates back more than one decade to OpenedHand that was then acquired by Intel and notably used during the Moblin/MeeGo era -- is finally being officially retired.

GNOME Shell and Mutter have issued their "42.beta" releases ahead of next month's GNOME 42.0 stable release.

For a while now Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical has been working on GNOME triple buffering support that would be dynamically enabled when the GPU rendering performance is falling behind. It's looking like that dynamic triple buffering may be close to mainlining and is leading big speed-ups for Intel graphics and the Raspberry Pi Broadcom graphics too while the other drivers ultimately should benefit too if falling behind in their desktop rendering performance.

GNOME Shell 42 has landed redesigned on-screen display (OSD) elements for notifications around volume, Bluetooth/WiFi status, workspace switching, and more.

GStreamer 1.20 is out as stable as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework.

The latest GNOME 42 feature work to mention is a ten month old merge request landing that cleans up and improves the XWayland termination for when there are no more X11 clients running within the GNOME Wayland session.

Developed during Google Summer of Code last year was an updated screenshot and screen recorder user interface. That improved screenshot/screencasting UI was merged this week for GNOME 42.

Now that Linux 5.17 has prepared DRM privacy screen support, the GNOME 42 is ready with its user-space side support for making use of this new standardized interface.

The alpha release of GNOME 42 is now available for testing.

Ubuntu developers have laid out their GNOME versioning plans for this spring's release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

The GNOME Shell and Mutter have checked in their new development releases for the imminent GNOME 42 Alpha milestone.

Adding to the changes for GNOME 42 this spring is the Mutter Wayland compositor now taking into account sub-surfaces when determining direct scanout capabilities.

Mutter landed a prominent addition today for GNOME 42: the Wayland compositor now supports the recently introduced DMA-BUF feedback extension.

GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit.

For those making use of the GNOME desktop and running a laptop with dual-GPU hybrid graphics, Mutter has landed some fixes that may help if you have been experiencing crashes.

While not talked about as much as raw performance and other factors, but in the recent testing of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, it was observed that the GNOME Wayland session by default on Ubuntu 21.10 is delivering better battery life / lower power consumption than using the GNOME X.Org session.

GNOME-focused Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical has proposed an optimization that could help with running NVIDIA graphics on high refresh rate displays.

An exciting new development for GNOME 42 is allowing input events to happen at their full input device rate, which is great news for high refresh rate Linux gamers, input tablets, and similar use-cases.

GNOME developer Allan Day has provided an update on behalf of the GNOME design time around some of their recent platform design improvements and some of the changes they are talking about in the near future.

GNOME 41 is out as the latest half-year update to this open-source desktop environment.

Ahead of the official GNOME 41 release later this month, the release candidate is now available to facilitate more testing.

The GNOME project has launched "Apps For GNOME" at apps.gnome.org for highlighting the ecosystem of available GNOME applications.

The GNOME 41 beta is now available ahead of next month's official half-year update to this open-source desktop environment.

GTK 4.4 is out as the latest stable update to the GTK4 open-source toolkit.

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on some important performance fixes for the GNOME desktop.

In recent months there has been an effort to update GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to reflect the GTK4 toolkit and recommendations around new widgets, utility panes, and more for enhancing the accessibility of GNOME applications, arguably looking better, and just otherwise modernizing aspects of the HIG that haven't been touched in months. That updated GNOME HIG is now official.

The GNOME project is out today with their first alpha release of the forthcoming GNOME 41 desktop environment.

Long running work by Ivan Molodetskikh to reduce the input latency for GNOME's Mutter compositor was merged today.

Triple buffering and deep color support are two of the features still being worked on for GNOME by Ubuntu maker Canonical.

Robert McQueen, the President of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, wrote a post this week ultimately about the GNOME project's need to broaden its focus in order to attract more new users and ultimately to be able to raise funds from new organizations outside of their traditional reach. If they aren't able to find new funding sources, they may need to scale back in some of their efforts but still have a sufficient safety net.

It's been a while since last having any major/exciting optimizations to the GNOME desktop to report on by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt that is known for his performance work over the past few years, but some optimizations are forthcoming.

GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" are in the process of being updated around the GTK4 tool-kit and new components like libadwaita and libhandy.

GNOME 41 this autumn will be shipping with libadwaita, the successor and GTK4 port to GNOME's libhandy that will help to define the visual language and user experience for GNOME applications.

GTK 4.2 is out today as the newest stable release of this open-source toolkit and incorporates bug fixes and other improvements as a result of feedback from developers working on transitioning from GTK3 to GTK4.

The big GNOME 40 desktop update is now available.

The release candidate of GNOME 40 is available today while the official GNOME 40.0 debut is still on track for next week.

GNOME developers remain very busy as they approach the finish line for GNOME 40.

Another feature tacked onto the big GNOME 40 desktop update is a headless native back-end for Mutter and the ability to easily create virtual monitors.

The patch series implementing support for Wayland's Presentation-Time protocol within the Mutter compositor has been merged ahead of this month's GNOME 40 release.

The new OpenGL renderer work for GTK 4 as a post-4.0 improvement is shaping up well and should really help push along the open-source toolkit on macOS.

The beta of GNOME 40 is out today, one month ahead of the stable release of this big open-source desktop environment update.

GNOME 40 beta is coming together with the GNOME Shell and Mutter components having seen new releases on Monday.

While the GTK 4.0 toolkit just released in December, GTK 4.2 is already gearing up for release next month with GNOME 40.

The user interface changes for GNOME 40 are quickly nearing the finish line with just two weeks to go until the UI freeze.