It seems only yesterday that Gnome 45 was released to further polish the open source desktop environment. On January 12, the team posted an announcement regarding the release of 46.alpha.

This latest release includes a few key features that should excite Gnome users. Headlining that list is the new headless remote login via the Gnome Display Manager (GDM). This new feature is made possible via gnome-remote-desktop, which provides a built-in server that allows users to connect remotely with Pipewire (the subsystem used for handling audio and video streams for Linux).

Also included with Gnome 46 is a new terminal app, called Prompt, which (according to the Gnome blog) "marries the best of Gnome Builder's seamless container support, the beauty of Gnome Editor, and the robustness of VTE."

Other new goodies that can be found in the new release are: a new offline documentation app called Biblioteca, GTK4 ports for System Monitor and Settings, Nautilus will now confirm passwords when creating protected ZIP archives, and Gnome Software supports user installation of local Flatpak files.

There also are plenty of improvements that boost performance and reliability.

You can read the full list of changes on the alpha release notes page.

For those wanting to test Gnome 46.alpha, you can download the Gnome 46.alpha sources, or use the latest Gnome OS install image. Just remember, this is an alpha release, so it should not be considered for production machines.