GNOME Sees Progress On Variable Refresh Rate Setting, Adding Battery Charge Control

There's been some new work pending for further enhancing the GNOME desktop when it comes around Variable Rate Refresh (VRR). Separately, there's new merge requests pending for adding laptop battery charge threshold controls from the GNOME UI.

As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there's been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they'd like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to best present the option as to avoid confusion as well as how it makes the most technical sense as far as the option goes.

GNOME has also seen some fixes around removing certain assumptions around fixed refresh rates and cursor movement becoming synchronized with the main content updates after performing a VT switch. Hopefully the GNOME VRR work will be all settled soon and ready for users.

Some other interesting but separate work being carried out is by GNOME developer Jelle van der Waa for offering up battery charge controls. This is to make use of the exposed Linux kernel charge control start/end thresholds for helping to preserve battery health for laptops frequently plugged in 24/7.

There are merge requests pending for UPower as well as the GNOME Control Center for allowing users to easily toggle this option to preserve the battery health for frequently plugged in systems by keeping the charge level in the 50~80% range. More details on that work via this blog post.