GNOME Console Could Be Ubuntu 22.10's GNOME Terminal Replacement

Back in May was a proposal by Canonical desktop software engineer Jeremy Bicha to use the new GNOME Console as the default terminal application in Ubuntu 22.10, replacing the GNOME Terminal. That default change hasn't happened yet but some necessary improvements have now been made to Ubuntu Kinetic's gnome-console package ahead of that possible shift.

The May proposal is to use GNOME Console in place of GNOME Terminal as the default terminal app, following the GNOME 42 upstream recommendation. GNOME Console is more minimal than GNOME Terminal, there is dark style preference support, native transparency support for the GNOME Console, notifications for long-running commands, UI color changes for root/sudo terminals, and other enhancements. GNOME Console was also recently ported to the GTK4 toolkit.

A blocking issue though was GNOME Console not supporting the notion of opening new tabs in the current tab's working directory. As of last week a patch has been added to Ubuntu 22.10's GNOME Console package to address that issue as well as for distro integration by letting x-terminal-emulator point to gnome-console. The nautilus-extension-gnome-console package is also set as a recommendation when installing gnome-console.

So while no default change has been made yet and GNOME Console isn't installed by default on the latest Ubuntu 22.10 daily builds, with those items now cleared we'll see if this default terminal change still happens for Ubuntu 22.10. For those curious, here is a side-by-side of GNOME Terminal and then GNOME Console with the latest Ubuntu 22.10 daily state:

At this stage, GNOME Console mostly has subtle improvements over GNOME Terminal like the translucency support and the color difference when running sudo/root commands:

Given the upstream recommendation from GNOME, expect other Linux distributions to begin transitioning from gnome-terminal to gnome-console moving forward.

Meanwhile, another default GNOME application change that already has been made for Ubuntu 22.10 is replacing Gedit with GNOME Text Editor:

Look for Ubuntu 22.10 to be out on 20 October with the latest GNOME desktop components and many other improvements throughout the OS.