GNOME 47 Alpha Released With Accent Color Support & Wayland-Only Build Option

The alpha release of GNOME 47 is now available for testing and comes with a number of shiny new features for this big open-source desktop update due out in September.

GNOME 47 Alpha "47.alpha" was released this Saturday morning as the first stepping stone toward GNOME 47.0. GNOME 47 is working its way to a planned release on 18 September. Among the highlights of GNOME 47 Alpha are:

- GNOME Shell now supports accent colors.

- GNOME Shell and Mutter can now be built without X11/XWayland support if wanting a pure Wayland environment.

- Support for the DRM lease protocol to better handle virtual reality (VR) headsets under the Wayland session.

- Mutter now supports hardware cursors with non-atomic kernel mode-setting (KMS) drivers.

- Mutter now supports the XDG dialog protocol along with other Wayland improvements.

- Better handling of different monitor sizes / layouts.

- GNOME Software makes more jobs asynchronous for better performance.

- GDM now supports S0ix suspend when determining if NVIDIA should use the Wayland session.

- GDM will now block suspend when remote displays are active.

- The gnome-initial-setup-copy-worker has been rewritten to not use GFile and GVFS.

- GNOME Remote Desktop now supports persistent remote login sessions.

- GNOME Calls is now ported to the GTK4 toolkit.

- GNOME Web (Epiphany) has added a "Not Now" option to the password popover along with various UI improvements throughout this web browser.

- GNOME Tracker (tracker and tracker-miners) have been dropped along with libdazzle while new modules are localsearch and tinysparql.

More details on the GNOME 47 Alpha changes via the GNOME Discourse. An updated GNOME OS image is also available for easy testing of this GNOME 47 development code.