After six months of development the launch of the new version of the desktop environment GNOME 41 which comes with a large number of important changes of which the most important that stand out are for example the expanding the possibilities of configuring energy consumption.
The ability to quickly change the power consumption mode is provided through the system status management menu. Applications have the ability to request a specific power consumption mode; for example, performance-sensitive games may request high-performance mode to be activated.
Another novelty that is presented is the new options to configure power saving mode, allowing you to control the screen dimming, turn off the screen after a certain period of user inactivity, and automatically turn it off when the battery is low.
Besides that the interface to manage the installation of applications has been redesigned, which simplifies the navigation and search for programs of interest. The application lists are designed as more descriptive maps with a short description. A new set of categories has been proposed to divide applications by topic.
And also the page with detailed information about the application has been redesigned, in which the size of the screenshots has been increased and the information content of each application has been increased. In addition, the layout of the settings and the lists of programs and programs already installed for which there are updates have been redesigned.
On the other hand, we can find that a new multitasking panel has been added to the configurator (GNOME Control Center) to customize window and desktop management.
In particular, in the Multitasking section, options are provided to disable the overview mode call tapping the upper left corner of the screen, resizing the window by dragging it to the edge of the screen, selecting the number of virtual desktops, displaying desktops on additionally connected monitors, and switching between applications for the current desktop only by pressing the Super + combination Tab.
Plus a new Connections app is included with a client implementation for remote desktop connection using VNC and RDP protocols. The application replaces the functionality for remote desktop access that was previously offered in Boxes.
The GNOME Music interface layout has been redesigned, in which the size of the graphics has been increased, the corners have been rounded, the display of the photos of the musicians has been added, the playback control panel has been redesigned.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The Mutter window manager code base has been cleaned up to improve efficiency and simplify maintenance.
- Optimized interface performance and responsiveness.
- In a Wayland-based session, the speed of updating the information on the screen has been increased and the reaction time for keystrokes and cursor movement has been shortened.
- Improved reliability and predictability of multi-touch gesture handling.
- In the Nautilus file manager, the dialog for managing compression has been redesigned and the ability to create password-protected ZIP archives has been added.
- The planner calendar now supports importing events and opening ICS files.
- A new tooltip has been proposed with information about the event.
- Epiphany browser has updated the built-in PDF viewer PDF.js and added a YouTube ad blocker based on the AdGuard script.
- A new Mobile Network panel has been added to manage the connection through cellular operators.
- The calculator interface has been completely redesigned, now automatically adapting to the screen size on mobile devices.
- Added support for categories in the notification system.
- GDM now has the ability to start Wayland-based sessions even if the login screen is X.Org-based.
- Wayland sessions are allowed for systems with NVIDIA GPUs.
- The Gnome disk uses LUKS2 for encryption. Added a dialog to configure the owner of the FS.
- GNOME Boxes adds support for playing audio from environments that use VNC to connect.
How to get or test the new version of Gnome 41?
For those interested in a quick assessment of the capabilities of GNOME 41, specialized live builds based on openSUSE and an installation image prepared as part of the GNOME operating system initiative are offered, and GNOME 41 is also included in the Fedora 35 experimental build.
While on the part of the packages for the different distributions, these will be arriving in a matter of hours to the repositories of these.