| guide | The GNOME Project has released the alpha version of the upcoming GNOME 45 desktop environment as a first development milestone, giving us an early look at new features and enhancements. |
The alpha release of the GNOME 45 desktop environment brings new apps including the Tecla keyboard layout viewer and Snapshot for taking photos and videos on mobile devices, as well as thanks to the new libadwaita 1.4 part, Baobab (disk analyzer) and A new look for GNOME's font viewer.
Many interesting changes revolve around the GNOME Control Panel (Settings) application, which now lets you close dialogs with the Esc key, improved accessibility, improved panel activation and search, improved support for RTL (from the right to left) language support, and numerous bug fixes.
Additionally, the "About" page now only shows major versions of GNOME, the "Date and Time" page now has clock and calendar toggles in the top bar, and has unified "Clock" and "Calendar" sections, and the "Display" page now allows you to All displays are configured and settings applied at once, while the Info page now shows each GPU on its own row.
Keyboard page now has "Compose" and "Character" keywords, Notifications page replaces "Apps" with "App Notifications", Power page now labels main "Battery" as UPS (if it is a UPS), and hides The auto-pause option in the virtual machine is disabled, and you can only update the host name in the "About" page after clicking Apply.
Additionally, the Network page now has a delete icon in the list of saved Wi-Fi connections, increased the maximum MTU value from 10000 to 6553, added the ability to keep the current mode when proxies are enabled, and shows a confirmation dialog when forgetting to connect , renamed "Other Devices" to "Bluetooth", improved the import of VPN files, and added support for screen readers in the security status and signal strength fields.
The Thunderbolt page has also been updated with a more modern device dialog UI, the share page now no longer has a global master switch, the sound page now offers audible bass on low-quality hardware, and the user page has the account activity window removed, And improved avatar cropping mechanism and rounded corners.
GNOME 45 alpha also introduces an improved Nautilus (Files) file manager, which gets search performance improvements, enhanced grid and list views, the ability to change default columns, a better archiving experience, and a few other changes.
It also introduces an improved Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser that now features a fancy new tab overview that replaces the old tab list dropdown, improved Firefox sync support, improved storage access and save password permission prompts, and scrapping support Board access permission requests, and support for new window operations in web application mode.
The GNOME package manager gains the ability to display OS updates including security fixes, supports notifications when system updates are downloaded, and the ability to clear application storage when uninstalling, improving support for Flatpak by showing whether installed applications have reached end-of-life App support, better support for GNOME OS, and improved navigation of the details and explore pages.
GNOME Calculator also received a bunch of changes, including new energy units, the ability to remember window sizes, extended displacement limits, a source of UN Treasury exchange rate data, and new currencies for the Jamaican dollar, Nigerian nair, and Ukrainian hryvnia , NT support via Bank of Canada exchange rates, improved Flatpak support, and the ability to open the main menu by pressing F10.
The Gedit text editor is still alive and has been updated to version 45, with a new keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+comma) to open the preferences dialog, improved filenames in the Documents panel so they are no longer than the width of the view, and inserting dates A new keyboard shortcut for the /time plugin.
The Loupe image viewer app written in Rust for GNOME now allows users to open multiple files at once via the file picker, supports mouse forward and back buttons, only lists supported image formats in the file picker, and disables trashing of non-native files Handling, removes shortcuts that use Backspace as garbage, improves SVG zoom's high-definition scroll wheel, and adds support for opening all given images in a window from the command line .
Last but not least, the GNOME Builder app now lets you write plugins using modern JavaScript powered by libpeas-2 and GJS, improved SourceKit-LSP integration, improved LSP protocol support, improved PHP Intelephense language server Integration that added the ability to set the number of callers recorded by a stack trace in the Valgrind plugin, and added the ability to disable text modifiers during undo/redo operations.
GNOME 45 alpha also brings multi-screen improvements to the GNOME System Monitor app, a new POI exploration UI and a new spin button to the GNOME Maps app, Unicode 15.0.1 and Support for the new Unicode CJK extensions and brings style improvements to the GNOME Text Editor application. For more details, check out the changelog on the release announcement page.
The alpha version of the GNOME 45 desktop environment should soon be available for public testing as part of development snapshots for Fedora Linux 39 Workstation (or Fedora Rawhide), openSUSE Tumbleweed, and other GNU/Linux distributions that offer pre-release images of the GNOME desktop.