A Look At The Exciting Features/Improvements Of GNOME 3.22

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 20 September 2016 at 01:14 PM EDT. Page 1 of 2. 38 Comments.

If all goes well, GNOME 3.22 will be officially released tomorrow, 21 September. Here is a recap of some of the new features and improvements made over this past six month development cycle plus some screenshots of the near-final desktop that will power the upcoming Fedora 25 Workstation.

I'm quite excited for GNOME 3.22 myself, in part due to excitement building for Fedora 25, and that the Wayland support is very well baked. I've been running GNOME 3.21 packages via way of Fedora 25 and Rawhide on various test systems at Phoronix. It's been a very smooth and stable experience and while the changes in GNOME 3.22 are mostly evolutionary, it's nice that GNOME 3 continues feeling more and more polished.

Among the highlights for GNOME 3.22 are:

Much better Wayland support! What I and many other enthusiasts have been looking for, especially with the prospects of Fedora 25 potentially shipping Wayland by default on supported systems in place of the X.Org Server. There's been Wayland GTK improvements to bring it close to parity with the X11 back-end, much work on Mutter and GNOME Shell around its Wayland support, and much more. Among some specific improvements this cycle were support for the on-screen keyboard and better screen rotation support and handling of graphics drawing tablets. Long story short, for day-to-day use GNOME on Wayland should be very usable except for some possible corner-cases.

The Nautilus file manager is much more competent now and supports features like batch renaming, integrates native compressed file handling, and other features.

A number of improvements to GNOME Software. There's also been much work for better handling of Flatpak packages within GNOME Software.


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