The GNOME Project announced today the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming GNOME 46 desktop environment series, due out later this month, for public testing.
The GNOME 46 RC (Release Candidate) milestone is here with one last set of changes for the final release on March 20th. Probably the biggest change is the long-awaited variable refresh rate (VRR) feature (even if it will be an experimental feature that users need to manually enable).
As for the Settings (GNOME Control Center), the Release Candidate introduces a new “Add Enterprise User” dialog on the Users page, as well as new “Remote Login” settings on the System page. Additionally, the “Remote Desktop” settings have been renamed to “Desktop Sharing” and it’s now possible to launch some subpages from the command line.
The improvemnts in the Release Candidate include the use of H.264 encoding for the screencasting feature, if available, and the implementation of modifier-aware screencasting support. It also improves the NetworkManager‘s WireGuard support, adds support for locking down extension installation for system integrators, provides the ability to inform users about conflicting local/remote sessions on login, and enhances the on-screen keyboard.
The Nautilus (Files) file manager received a number of updates, including improved positioning of loop mounts in the sidebars, enhanced internationalization, and performance optimization for multi-file properties.
The GNOME Connections application has now introduced support for the FreerRDP 3 protocol. It also showcases improved scrolling for touchpads and smoother scroll events. The GNOME Display Manager (GDM) has been updated and now employs Wayland as default on certain server chips and has the capability to terminate conflicting sessions at login. Furthermore, gnome-remote-desktop has ceased using DMA buffer support with NVIDIA.
In addition to this, GNOME Maps has seen a surge of updates to its map style. GNOME Clocks now displays a toast when a new alarm is set and disables an alarm once it’s rung once, if it isn’t set to repeat itself. Lastly, Swell Foop, the game, has been enhanced for score handling and keyboard-only gameplay, and it now presents the high score goal on the Game Over screen.
The Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser now closes the page menu popover on print, search, and full-screen actions and focuses the location entry when using the Ctrl+K keyboard shortcut to activate the address bar’s default search engine.
Also, the GNOME Text Editor app now disables editing while a document is loading and discards documents that are still loading when saving a session, the GNOME Software app improves the launching of some apps, the GNOME Console terminal emulator now remembers if the window was maximized or not when restoring window dimensions, and the Orca screen reader received support for the new Spiel speech synthesis API.
Apps like GNOME System Monitor, GNOME Calculator, Lightsoff, Loupe, Tecla, and GNOME Sudoku received various small fixes and updated translations. For more details, check out the changelog on the release announcement page, from where you can also download the GNOME 46 RC installation image if you want to give it a try.
As mentioned before, the final release of the GNOME 46 desktop environment is expected on March 20th, 2024. However, unlike KDE Plasma 6, we will have to wait a couple of weeks or even more to enjoy its new features and enhancements until distro maintainers manage to update their GNOME offerings to the new release.
Last updated 38 mins ago
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