GNOME 40 Release Candidate Arrives Ahead Of Next Week's Official Debut

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

The GNOME 40 release candidate, or "GNOME 40.rc" as it's referred to with the new convention, delivers on the last minute GNOME Shell and Mutter improvements including a better app folder appearance, multi-monitor enhancements, better overview performance, improved refresh rate calculation, the new headless native back-end, Wayland presentation time protocol support, running XWayland on-demand by default, and other changes.

Also found with GNOME 40.rc includes:

- Various bug fixes to the Epiphany web browser.

- A GLib security issue fix.

- RAR support has been restored in GNOME-Autoar.

- New default background and other background options.

- GNOME Boxes will now default to using USB3 for supported operating systems.

- New shortcuts within the GNOME Calculator.

- Improved startup loading for GNOME Music.

- GNOME Online Accounts now enables Last.fm support by default.

- GNOME Software introduces a new featured apps carousel display. GNOME Software also has improved icon handling and other enhancements.

- GTK 4.1.2 has Vulkan fixes, NGL performance improvements, and other toolkit improvements.

More details on the GNOME 40.rc release via the mailing list. GNOME 40.0 should be out next week with any lingering bug fixes and translation updates. At this stage GNOME 40 is now under a hard code freeze and requires approval from the release team for changes besides translations and documentation work.