GNOME 47 Beta Desktop Released with Many Changes, Here’s What’s New

After a long wait, the GNOME Project released today the beta version of the upcoming GNOME 47 desktop environment series, due out on September 18th, 2024.

There’s been a lot of changes added since the alpha version of the GNOME 47 desktop series, and the beta release is packed with lots of goodies, including support for hardware encoding for screen recordings, support for tablet tool keybindings and actions, support for tablet tool pressure ranges, and implementation of placement and focus logic with always-on-top windows.

GNOME 47 beta also improves the sticky behavior with transient dialogs, adds plumbing for transforming the color state, implements the ability to recover from secondary GPU update failures, adds support for the notification portal to always use the GTK protocol, improves the Persian on-screen keyboard layout, makes the overview startup notification more reliable, and adds unlinked rounded buttons in notifications and dialogs.

The Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser received a lot of attention during the beta cycle with new features like autofill support, a bookmarks search bar, a Privacy Report feature, a Ctrl+Shift+Delete shortcut for the Clear Website Data dialog, and importing of passwords from CSV files. It also received improvements for sorting bookmarks, the autofill dialog UI, and the bookmarks UI, which now uses the sidebar instead of popover.

Epiphany 47 beta also brings back the ability to set an image as wallpaper when it’s installed as a Flatpak, adds a prompt dialog for confirmation when installing a WebExtension, replaces the bookmark properties popover with a redesigned dialog, reduces the size of the preferences dialog, adopts modern libadwaita spinners and new floating bar style from Nautilus, and reenables search in the preferences dialog.

GNOME Calendar received the ability to import ICS files using drag and drop, along with improvements to the file importer dialog and the spacing of the Month view, GNOME Console now has an expanded preferences dialog that includes scrollback size and screen reader support has been restored, and GNOME Initial Setup received a lightly refreshed Password page with a field to set an optional password hint, while the Privacy page was removed.

Among other changes, GNOME 47 beta improves the detection of non-seekable files in the Evince document viewer, adds support for gnome-remote-desktop persistent sessions to GNOME Display Manager (GDM), enables Mail, Calendar & Contacts and a setup dialog for Microsoft 365 in GNOME Online Accounts, and a new “status-icons” extension has been added.

On top of that, GNOME Software received a plugin to ease the installation of DKMS and akmods key when Secure Boot is enabled, GNOME System Monitor now features a more modern UI for dialogs and the Disks view and better initial loadgraph points, and GNOME Text Editor received improvements to print operations and spellcheck, and various recoloring tweaks to better match platform styling.

The Loupe image viewer now properly detects non-transparent images and uses best-fit scaling when rotating a freshly opened image, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome now uses GNOME Shell’s private API for the Notification portal and Nautilus for the File Chooser portal, and GVFS received a couple of OneDrive improvements.

There are also many changes to GNOME Settings, which now features a modernized “Add User” dialog, password “enforcing” based on /etc/security/pwquality.conf, support for the new gnome-remote-desktop server configuration DBUs interface, the ability to set up Wacom stylus keyboard shortcuts and switch monitor, as well as updated Accessibility, Apps, Keyboard, Display, Location, Mouse, Network, Notifications, Online Accounts, Users, Printers, Privacy, Remote Desktop, Sound, and WWAN settings pages.

Numerous bugs were addressed as well so check out the changelog on the release announcement page for more details. Meanwhile, you can take the beta version of the GNOME 47 desktop environment for a test drive by downloading the GNOME OS 47 beta ISO image, which you can install on a virtual machine with EFI support, such as the GNOME Boxes version from Flathub.

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