GNOME 3.32 Beta Released With Performance Improvements, Last Minute Features

GNOME 3.31.90 has been released as what is effectively the GNOME 3.32 beta and also marks the feature/UI/API freezes for this next half-year update to the GNOME desktop.

The brief GNOME 3.32 beta announcement can be read on the mailing list while the highlights of this release come down to:

- The DConf utility has been rewritten in C.

- The Epiphany "GNOME Web" web-browser has received animation improvements, a setting to control hardware acceleration, a new design for the security popover, CSS styling improvements, various scaling improvements when running on small form factors, tab menu improvements, and other refinements.

- The Gedit text editor has switched over to Meson with dropping its Autotools support. The Flatpak and Snap versions of Gedit now also come with gedit-plugins support.

- API improvements to GJS.

- GLib-Networking has added an OpenSSL back-end to obsolete the former glib-openssl code. This is an alternative to the default GnuTLS back-end and primarily geared for embedded devices and other select cases.

- The GNOME Boxes virtualization software now uses host-pass-through as the default CPU mode.

- GNOME Initial Setup now generates default user account pictures.

- GNOME Shell has better icon grid performance, among other performance fixes.

- GNOME Software now shows the permissions for installed Flatpaks and permissions on updates. There are also many GNOME Software fixes throughout.

- GNOME Weather has moved over from Autotools to Meson.

- Mutter picks up support for buffer transforms with its Wayland back-end, improved performance for secondary GPUs, EGLStreams fixes, improved render performance for KMS devices with software OpenGL, and other enhancements.

- More apps dropping the App Menu support now that the concept has been deprecated.

If all goes well, the release candidate will be out a month from today while GNOME 3.32.0 will premiere on 13 March.