The GNOME Project announced today the overall availability of the discharge Candidate (RC) milestone of the forthcoming GNOME 40 desktop environment series. Initially set to be released last week on March 13th, the GNOME 40 Release Candidate is that the last milestone within the six-month-long development cycle of the favoured desktop environment employed by numerous GNU/Linux distributions.
GNOME 40 Release Candidate Now Available
Since the GNOME 40 Beta version, the event team managed to feature eleventh-hour features and enhancements to form GNOME 40 an excellent release. There are changes everywhere, starting with the Adwaita icon theme, which received full color emblem contrast and new symbolic icons. The GNOME Display Manager (GDM) received better fingerprint authentication support, RAR support is back within the gnome-autoar utility, GNOM Boxes now uses USB3 on supported operating systems, Last.fm is now enabled by default in GNOME Online Accounts, and new default backgrounds are added also.
Of course, the most important changes are seen within the GNOME Shell and Mutter components, which are the guts of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME Shell now offers improved minimap previews on multi-monitor systems, improved appearance of the app folders, double super support for opening the app grid, improved workspace handling on secondary monitors, improved interaction when dragging between app grid pages, improved overview performance, a serious change, namely to start out the session in overview mode by default (like within the image below). On the opposite hand, Mutter received better keyboard input for remote desktops under the X11 session, along side remote desktop caps- and num-lock state properties, improved refresh rate calculation, a replacement presentation-time protocol, also because the ability to start out XWayland on demand when running under systemd.
Also noteworthy are the improvements implemented in GNOME Software package manager, which now features a carousel for featured apps, the power to update the list of Flatpak repositories when it’s changed via the command-line, the power to display the discharge date in version history, and better support for HiDPI screens. the discharge of the RC milestone also marks the top of the event cycle for GNOME 40, which can see the sunshine of day as soon as next week, March 24th, 2021. However, it always takes about fortnight for rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed to supply the new desktop environment in their repositories. The GNOME Project uses this Release Candidate to collect eleventh-hour feedback from the community to form sure no critical issues are present within the final release.
As such, if you would like to assist with the testing, you’ll download the installer image, which may even be wont to port your GNOME extensions to the GNOME 40 stack. If you would like to put in the GNOME 40 Release Candidate using the Flatpak universal sandboxed binary format, you’ll download the corresponding Flatpak runtimes from Flathub Beta repository. this is often useful for application developers who want to focus on the GNOME 40 platform and test their apps against of the RC branch. Linux OS maintainer who wants to start out integrating the GNOME 40 desktop environment in their upcoming distro releases can compile the discharge Candidate milestone by using the official BuildStream project snapshot or the source packages.
