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 46 Alpha (or "46.alpha" as they prefer to call it) was released this morning for testing. There's an updated GNOME OS build for those wanting to easily test out the GNOME 46 Alpha components in a live environment.

Among the many changes to find with GNOME 46 Alpha include:

- The GDM log-in/display manager has added support for RDP graphical remote login support as an exciting addition for GNOME 46.

- The many GNOME Shell and Mutter improvements.

- Dropping Google Safe Browsing support from GNOME Web (Epiphany) due to the terms of service changing.

- The Nautilus file manager will now confirm password when creating protected ZIP archives, new style banners, and other refinements and fixes.

- Performance improvements and additional threading work for GNOME Tracker.

- GNOME Software now supports the user installation of local Flatpak files, among other improvements to this GNOME app center.

- GNOME System Monitor has been ported to GTK4.

- Libnotify has a critical stability / minor security update around Electron apps that utilize Portal notifications.

- GJS has improved its console output support alongside many other updates.

- GNOME Backgrounds now favors JPEG-XL as a format and adds a new default background.

- GNOME Maps now supports the OpenTripPlanner v2 GraphQL for public transit routing.

- Better anti-aliasing for the 16 x 16 pixel Adwaita icon theme.

- Cogl has been dropped from GNOME 46 now that it's unused.

More details on the GNOME 46 Alpha via GNOME's Discourse. The GNOME 46 beta is due by mid-February while the stable GNOME 46.0 release is expected on 20 March.