GNOME 40 Alpha Released

GNOME 40 is now available as the first step towards releasing this updated Linux desktop environment in March.

GNOME 40 Alpha comes with a ton of changes -- many of which we have been outlining in various Phoronix articles over the past few months. Among the main highlights of GNOME 40 Alpha are:

- GTK4 through GTK 4.0.2 is now pulled into the GNOME collection.

- GNOME Shell 40 Alha uses GPU rendering for most shadows, gesture improvements, top bar styling changes, and a variety of other changes as noted in prior Phoronix articles.

- Mutter meanwhile brings XWayland improvements, crash fixes, rendering improvements, and other Wayland related fixes.

- The Nautilus file manager now supports showing a creation date with supported file-systems / kernels.

- Simple Scan now supports a text resolution scanning of 200 DPI.

- The GNOME Shell Extensions code has ported its extensions preferences to GTK4.

- GNOME System Monitor has a variety of improvements to its user interface.

- GNOME Weather has a major redesign to its UI and is also now adaptive for mobile/desktop.

- GNOME Disk Utility now has an adaptive user-interface while apps like GNOME Maps have improved their adaptive UI support.

- Epiphany, GNOME's Web Browser, has disabled the safe-browsing phishing protection due to Google's changed Terms of Service around API keys in open-source projects.

- Many GJS improvements/additions, including some performance improvements.

- GLib has support for querying and running UWP applications on Windows.

The full list of GNOME 40 Alpha changes and source download links can be found via the GNOME mailing list.

GNOME 40.0 aims to be out by the end of March but with distributions like Ubuntu 21.04 opting to stick to GNOME 3.38 a bit longer, it may not be until later in the year that your distribution of choice decides to move froward with GTK4 and GNOME 40.