Gnome 48 Alpha Ready for Testing
The latest Gnome desktop alpha is now available with plenty of new features and improvements.
While Gnome 48 Alpha is not a massive upgrade, there are some new additions and improvements that go a long way in making the open source desktop better.
New features include the Decibel audio player, new notifications for headphone connections, and wellness additions, such as support for screen time limits and health breaks. The screen time support should function with other Gnome Shell and Mutter features.
This latest release also improves Wayland timing and queuing protocols for Mutter, adds image edit support for Gnome Image Viewer, improves the history dialog for the Epiphany browser, introduces initial support for Vulkan and VAAPI hardware acceleration for Gnome Remote Desktop, includes several improvements to the Orca screen reader, adds support for Adobe PDF open parameters to the Evince document viewer, and more.
You can view a list of the updates to various modules, as well as those that have been added or removed from this Gnome News post.
Those interested in testing the new alpha release can either kick the tires with the latest Gnome OS image or wait for the beta release that should be coming in February. The final release of Gnome 48 is predicted to be available on March 19th, 2025.
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