A Look At The New Features Of GNOME 3.26

With GNOME 3.26 due to be officially released on Wednesday, 13 September, here is a look at the new features to be found in this major desktop update and screenshots from testing the latest GNOME 3.26 packages via Fedora 27's development images.

GNOME 3.26 is the project's latest six-month update to this open-source desktop environment to be used now by Ubuntu 17.10, Fedora 27, and others. I have been testing out the near-final GNOME 3.26 packages via the Fedora 27 repository over the weekend. Overall it's been a stable and good experience. Some of the new features or changes of GNOME 3.26 are outlined below.

Continued Wayland improvements! GNOME 3.24 has already been working out wonderful on Wayland (in my opinion) and has been stable on my production boxes running Fedora 26. But with GNOME 3.26 has been a variety of other minor improvements to further polish this next-gen display support. The Wayland fixes/tuning range from GTK4 improvements to bug fixes in different packages.

GNOME has largely been working well with HiDPI displays for a few releases now, but Mutter has seen some more display and HiDPI improvements. Mutter has also switched to its new monitor configuration system. There is also better half-tiling support.

Built-in screencast and remote desktop capabilities. This is built into Mutter itself for the streaming and remote input event handling and thus works on both X11 and Wayland environments. This makes use of PipeWire and gnome-remote-desktop is the new program to make use of this GNOME-designed remote desktop functionality. Expect this GNOME screencasting / remote desktop capabilities to evolve over the GNOME 3.28 cycle, the current functionality was just merged into Mutter at the last minute.

The new GNOME Control Center display has rolled out! It's looking pretty nice and makes more effective use of the screen real estate.