| guide | The GNOME Project recently announced that the beta series of the upcoming GNOME 45 desktop environment series, due to be released in late September 2023, has been officially released and is available for public testing. |
The GNOME 45 beta, which comes about five weeks after the alpha release, further improves the GNOME Control Center (Settings) application that appears to be the star of the upcoming major release. The GNOME Control Center beta contains various memory leak and accessibility tab fixes, as well as porting several settings rows to the new AdwSwitchRow widget.
GNOME 45 Beta's Settings app reorganizes the Privacy panel, groups all subpanels into one category, makes the new About panel more compact, adds instructions to the Date & Time panel to explain A new "Clock & Calendar" option, and added a banner in the "Online Accounts" panel indicating when the system was offline, so that no new accounts are created until reconnected to the Internet.
The "Users" panel has also been updated to only show the "Other Users" section if there is a user, the entire panel will be made insensitive when the user does not have permission to change various options within it, and addresses issues reported by users from the file Focus issues when selecting an avatar image.
Also updated is the Printers panel, which now uses a "card" style to display printer entries.
GNOME's file manager Nautilus (Files) now uses a new navigation view with a flat title bar to display properties windows, no longer switches to view mode when searching for files, no longer adds searches to the history stack, and optimizes selecting or deleting large View performance for files.
GNOME Shell 45 beta adds the ability to load extensions as modules, a new camera indicator, a new toggle for keyboard backlighting in quick settings, the ability to run "perf" tests as external scripts , support for previewing keyboard layouts Tecla library and better Light style variants.
The new Loupe image viewing application introduced as part of the GNOME 45 release has been renamed Image Viewer and gains JPEG-XL support, an improved print dialog, sandboxing for SVG rendering, dropdown targets , improvements to image browsing on SMB shares, improvements to touchscreen gestures when zooming in, and overshoot for swipe gestures.
In addition, the GNOME 45 beta also improves the GNOME Software application, provides better error notifications for GPG check failures, supports disabling animations in the user interface based on the user's accessibility settings, and improves the ability to remove other packages to An update mechanism for packages that satisfy dependencies.
The new version of GNOME Software also provides better support for Debian GNU/ Linux and Ubuntu distributions, forcing them to always use GNOME Software's built-in dialogs instead of the repository dialogs provided by each GNU/Linux distribution.
GNOME System Monitor has been updated to use "terminate" instead of "end" to kill processes. The GNOME Calculator now handles the left and right cursor keys better, the toolbar has been improved using the Adwaita library, and various improvements have been brought to the Flatpak release.
The GNOME 45 beta also updates the GNOME Console terminal emulator with a new preferences window for setting custom fonts and changing ringtone behavior, the ability to zoom with Ctrl+Scroll, and better keyboard support for admin tabs , telnet as a "remote" type, tabs for tabs in the switcher, and various fixes to notifications, drag and drop, detaching and closing tabs, and the UI.
Last but not least, the GNOME Connections app now lets users press the Esc key to close onboarding dialogs, improves desktop resizing, and adds clipboard channel support.
Additionally, the GNOME Maps app now always shows phone numbers as links in Flatpak versions, bringing better adaptability to various screen and touch gestures for opening sidebars, and again when going to new places and showing directions Show animation.
GNOME 45 Beta also updates the xdg-desktop-portal-gnome component with new input capture portal support, clipboard portal support, the ability to resume remote desktop sessions, and remote desktop session communication via EIS sockets.
There have also been some changes to the GNOME initial setup, including always showing the Accessibility menu, support for disabling some extraneous GNOME Shell features, and support for the Tecla library as a new runtime dependency for displaying keyboard layout previews.
In addition to this, the accelerator and UI of the GNOME Log application have also been improved, the GNOME Text Editor application can now set "plain text" in the language selection dialog, and no longer shows keyboard shortcuts in tooltips , Mutter also gained support for the YUV format, KMS threads, and support for the Wayland-friendly libei input capture and analog input libraries.
GNOME 45 beta releases are available for public testing as part of various development releases such as Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) or Fedora 39 Rawhide. You can even install it on Arch Linux following this tutorial. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version and not suitable for production use!