Six months of fastidious development has gone into making the newest release of the GNOME desktop the simplest one yet. In all, GNOME 40 consists of a huge 24,571 commits from roughly 822 different contributors. The many GNOME 40 features include a replacement design for the overview screen, a horizontal workspace switcher, and new features during a crop of apps, including the Nautilus file manager.
Stable GNOME 40 release is now officially available to download
The desktop also now boots to the overview screen by default, meaning users aren’t left watching an empty state. We spotlighted these (and many other changes) during a recent article but suffice to mention , there’s a sizeable set of enhancements on offer here, including:
- Various design changes
- Workspaces are now horizontal
- Dash is at rock bottom screen edge
- New touchpad gestures for entering overview
- New touchpad gestures for switching workspaces
- Improved keyboard shortcut settings
- Compose key setting
- ‘About’ settings shows hardware vendor/model number
- Software app features a new carousel on the homepage
- App lists in Software now show version history
- Nautilus can extract password-protected .zip archives
- The weather app features a new design
- Maps scales to be used on mobile
- Improved tabs in Epiphany/GNOME Web
You can see a number of the improvements listed in these screenshots:
For more details on this release inspect the GNOME 40 mini-site.
