GNOME 41 Alpha Released With Many Desktop Changes Accumulating

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

GNOME 41 isn't due out until September but there are already many changes merged for GNOME "41.alpha" besides the usual translation updates and bug fixes. Some major components like GNOME Shell and Mutter didn't issue their 41 Alpha releases in time for the formal release, but among the changes to be found in the official NEWS entry for GNOME 41 Alpha includes:

- The Epiphany web browser now uses a smaller address bar font in the narrow mode, the address bar drop-down now supports various filters, updated PDF.js, the web process is now killed when it is unresponsive for too long, new keyboard shortcuts, and other improvements.

- The Evince document viewer has dropped its browser plugin support.

- The Gedit text editor now enables the OpenLink plug-in by default, various GTK widget changes, and other updates.

- GJS has better stability.

- GNOME Boxes now has support for audio playback on VNC connections for this virtual machine viewer along with other improvements.

- GNOME Calculator has reworked its user interface.

- The GTK 4.3.1 toolkit has many fixes, support for EGL on X11, and other improvements.

GNOME 41 Alpha source downloads and more information via the mailing list.

The beta release of GNOME 41 is expected around this time next month, the GNOME 41 release candidate in early September, and then to officially see GNOME 41.0 released on 22 September.