GNOME 42 Alpha Released With A Lot Of GTK4 Porting, Other Improvements

The alpha release of GNOME 42 is now available for testing.

GNOME 42 is working up to its release in March while out today is the "42.alpha" milestone. GNOME 42 components have been seeing a lot of work porting from GTK3 to GTK4, beginning to make use of libadwaita, support for the dark mode / dark preference option, and a variety of other improvements.

Some of the specific changes worth noting with GNOME 42 Alpha include:

- The Baobab disk usage analyzer has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita.

- GNOME Calls now shows avatars in the call history and call display.

- The Epiphany web browser now supports the system dark preference, updates its bundled PDF.js, has memory leak fixes, now always enables its accelerated compositing mode, and has other improvements. Epiphany also has preparations for moving to GTK4.

- The GDM log-in manager has udev updates for the NVIDIA Wayland support.

- GNOME Bluetooth has been ported to GTK4.

- GNOME Boxes for virtualization has introduced a new preferences dialog, porting some widgets to libhandy, and other improvements.

- GNOME Builder adds a BuildStream plugin, Rubucop support, an experimental Clangd plug-in, Clang-Format integration, Language Server Protocol handling improvements, support for Intelphense and Blueprint language servers, and a variety of other improvements to this integrated development environment.

- GNOME Calculator adds support for Flatpak development builds, migrates to GTK4, and other improvements.

- GNOME Clocks has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita.

- GNOME Desktop splits libgnome-desktop into gnome-desktop, gnome-rr, and gnome-bg components.

- The GNOME Disk Utility now supports the dark theme preference, prepares for GTK4, and other updates.

- Various improvements to GNOME Maps.

- GNOME Software updates various user-inteface elements, provides a more informed System Update progress, allows searching for extensions, adds new GNOME Circle apps to the featured carousel, improves metadata support for Snaps, and other improvements.

- The Nautilus file manager improves the design of the file renaming user-interface, improves the visuals of the file conflicts UI, supports searching by file creation time, adds compressed archives to recent files, and ports over to GTK4.

- The Totem media player adds support for MPL subtitles.

- The many GNOME Shell and Mutter improvements for 42.alpha.

The GNOME 42 Alpha release announcement can be read on the devel-announce-list.

GNOME 42 will be found in Fedora Workstation 36 this spring. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is also planning to pick up GNOME 42 components not depending upon GTK4.