A Look At The Many Improvements & New Features In GNOME 3.32

Barring any last minute delays, GNOME 3.32 is expected to ship today as the latest six-month update to this popular open-source desktop environment. GNOME 3.32 personally has me quite excited more so for the improvements -- and bug fixes -- over "new" features, but here is a look at some of what there is to get excited about with this latest update to the GNOME 3 desktop.

Not listed in any particular order, notable changes with GNOME 3.32 includes:

- Fractional scaling support in GNOME Shell and Mutter to provide for a much better HiDPI/retina display scaling experience.

- A great deal of performance improvements including latency reductions, CPU usage bug fixes, bottleneck reductions, lower RAM usage, and related optimizations.

- Related to the performance work is also much better support for secondary GPUs / external GPUs, primarily those USB-driven displays that may be hot-plugged and not necessarily have onboard 3D acceleration capabilities.

- GNOME Wayland now cooperates better for non-60Hz displays.

- Much better performance with ASpeed display hardware as is commonly found on server/workstation platforms for display.

- Continued separation of the Wayland and X11 code paths for ultimately moving out the X11-specific code and cleaning up the low-level GNOME code in general.

- An overhaul to their application icons.

- Responsive UI work with more applications leveraging libhandy, responsiveness work for the GNOME Control Center, and related work.

- GNOME Music will now pause any music playback when suspending the system.

- More GNOME packages continue migrating from Autotools and Meson. The packages switched to Meson earlier cycles have continued seeing Meson build system improvements.

- WebKitGTK has picked up support for JPEG2000.

- Retiring of App Menus.

- GNOME's zoom mode is no longer so buggy.

- Various fixes to GNOME Software as well as Flatpak improvements.

- A big refactoring to GNOME Builder and other improvements to this GNOME-focused integrated development environment.

- GNOME Boxes virtualization now enables VirtIO-GPU if the operating system supports it as well as enabling 3D acceleration, SSH client support, and related improvements.

- "Version 2" of the screen-casting API for Mutter.

- A lot of other bug fixes.

What are you most excited about with GNOME 3.32? Let us know in the forums. GNOME 3.32 will be found in the upcoming Ubuntu 19.04 and Fedora 30 releases and soon with the rolling-release distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, and Arch.