GNOME Shell 42 Lands Redesigned OSD Notifications

GNOME Shell 42 has landed redesigned on-screen display (OSD) elements for notifications around volume, Bluetooth/WiFi status, workspace switching, and more.

Stemming from recent design mock-ups calling for a "sensible" indicator for volume, device status, and workspaces, such OSD changes have now landed in GNOME Shell 42.

The original OSD mockup issue ticket by Red Hat's Jakub Steiner noted, "We currently use huge indicator when changing volume, toggling some keys or device status and also have obnoxiously large workspace context indicator when using the keyboard shortcuts to switch. All of these could keep the same layout and be more sensible in terms of size."

The redesigned, smaller GNOME 42 OSD elements.

Red Hat's Florian Müllner went on to implement the OSD redesign over the past few weeks and today was merged into GNOME Shell ahead of next month's GNOME 42.0 release.

GNOME 42 will be out at the end of March with the improved OSD design, (X)Wayland enhancements, a new screenshot/screencast UI, DRM privacy screen support, more porting to the GTK4 toolkit, DMA-BUF feedback support, full-rate input events, and much more.