GNOME News Archives

Back in March the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program. The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced.

GNOME Sushi as the file previewer component for the GNOME Files (Nautilus) file manager has now been adapted to make use of GTK4 as well as delivering other enhancements for a nicer file previewing experience on GNOME.

GNOME Circle as the initiative for third-party/independent software applications and libraries extending the GNOME desktop ecosystem is taking a stand against AI slop. The GNOME Circle policy has been updated to reject low-effort, vibe coded applications/libraries where the developer is not able to take responsibility for the work.

The upcoming GTK 4.23.1 development release is introducing a new feature called Snapping, which should enhance the experience when dealing with fractional scaling on today's high resolution displays.

GNOME Commander, the orthodox file manager for the GNOME desktop that was inspired by Norton Commander, has been rewritten in the Rust programming language and also now using the GTK4 toolkit.

The current GNOME System Monitor is on track to be replaced by the GNOME Resources app for as soon as the GNOME 51 desktop release.

GNOME's help viewer, Yelp, last year was impacted by a serious security issue for arbitrary file reads. There's a new vulnerability affecting the GNOME help viewer that led to the Yelp 49.1 release to address a possible Flatpak sandbox escape vector.

While since GNOME 48 Decibels is the new audio player of the GNOME desktop, there is no shortage of other GNOME/GTK-aligned music players. Last month was the big Amerbol music player update and there are Lollypop and others. The latest GNOME-aligned music player now hitting the 1.0 milestone is Nocturne.

One of the interesting GNOME-aligned application developments in recent months has been RustConn as a modern GTK4-based connection manager. RustConn allows managing SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, and a variety of other connections from this Rust-written application. It's been steadily tacking on more features and that effort continued with more features landing.

A fix today for GNOME Shell's screen casting/recording service was merged after it was reported that H.264 recordings using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are around 18x larger than they should be like when using the VP8 software fallback.

For pairing nicely with the GNOME 50 desktop release last month, a number of GNOME-associated apps have been seeing new features and refinements.

GNOME Shell 50.1 and Mutter 50.1 were released today as the first point releases in the GNOME 50 series.

A few weeks past the GNOME 50 release and there continues to be a lot of ongoing GNOME app activity worth highlighting.

In the past few days was the release of FreeCAD 1.1 and SolveSpace 3.2 for open-source computer aided design (CAD) while now joining the party is Design 50 Alpha as a GNOME-aligned 2D CAD design tool.

Following the release of GNOME 50, Gedit 50 was released on Friday as the newest version of this graphical text editor aligned with the GNOME desktop. Moving forward the Gedit developers are banning AI / large language model (LLM) driven developments and aim to ship more releases faster.

Following last week's big GNOME 50 release, the GNOME Foundation today formally announced the creation of the GNOME Fellowship program.

The GTK 4.0 toolkit released in December 2020 while the GTK3 toolkit has continued to be maintained given a lot of software still relying on that older version. GTK 3.24.52 was released yesterday and with this version it's now shifting its release cadence to just one new update per year.

Cambalache 1.0 released today after more than five years in development as a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) application for creating and editing user interfaces for both GTK3 and GTK4.

GNOME 50 is out today, on-schedule and just in time for being the default desktop of the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44.

GNOME OS as the Linux-based distribution that serves as the leading-edge, reference platform of GNOME desktop development is now using KMSCON by default.

GNOME's GitLab infrastructure has already been using Anubis for a while to help fend off bots and AI scraper traffic from wreacking havoc on their server resources and also their hosting budget. GNOME recently began redirecting some GitLab traffic to their GitHub repositories as another step in dealing with bots/scrapers. Now they have taken an added step of using the commercial, closed-source Fastly in their battle with bots.

Maui.Gtk is a new open-source project providing a GTK4 Linux back-end for Microsoft's .NET MAUI.

Resources, the modern GNOME GTK4/libadwaita-based GUI application for system resource monitoring and an alternative to GNOME System Monitor, is out with a new update. Resources 1.10.2 brings some nice improvements for those running GNOME on modern Intel hardware.

GNOME 50.rc was christened today as the release candidate for the GNOME 50 desktop.

There is two weeks to go until the GNOME 50 stable release while out today is the release candidate of Mutter 50. This Mutter 50.rc release brings some exciting last-minute enhancements to this Wayland compositor.

If you are cloning from a GNOME repository on their GitLab and now finding your Git traffic being redirected to GitHub, you are not alone. GNOME's infrastructure team is now redirecting Git traffic from the GNOME.org GitLab over to GitHub mirrors for reducing bandwidth costs.

Matthias Clasen shared an update today concerning the state of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) within GNOME's GTK toolkit.

Following GNOME 50's Mutter merging sdr-native color mode support for wide color gamut displays this week, another late addition to Mutter has now been merged ahead of next month's GNOME 50 stable release.

As a late stage change for GNOME 50 ahead of its official debut next month and following last week's GNOME 50 beta is plumbing the Mutter compositor for a new "sdr-native" color mode option.

In addition to this week's GNOME 50 beta release, there were also other exciting developments in the GNOME ecosystem.

The GNOME 50 beta release is now available ahead of the official GNOME 50 desktop due out in March.

GNOME's Rust-based and sandboxed Glycin image loading library focused on safety now supports JPEG 2000 images by default.

While just missing out on the recent Mutter 50 beta release, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of next month's GNOME 50 desktop release are some improvements to the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

GTK toolkit developers met in Brussels once again for their annual hackfest during FOSDEM week.

Ahead of the imminent GNOME 50 beta release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter components have declared their "50.beta" releases to ship the latest bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and some last minute improvements ahead of the stable release in March.

In time for next month's GNOME 50 release are some improvements merged today for the Mutter compositor code adding HiDPI and monitor mode emulation support to the screen-casting API and DevKit.

GNOME Resources 1.10 was christened today as the newest version of this modern system monitoring app for the GNOME desktop that is now used by default on the likes of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. With GNOME Resources 1.10 they have added AMD Ryzen AI NPU monitoring support and other new capabilities.

Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon.

Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature.

GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings.

The upcoming release of GNOME 50 to be found in the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 will feature improved discrete GPU detection within the GNOME Shell. This effort has been two years coming and finally merged this week.

Newlle as a virtual AI assistant for the GNOME desktop with API integration for Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq, and also local LLMs is out with a new release. Newelle has been steadily expanding its AI integration and capabilities and with the new Newelle 1.2 are yet more capabilities for those wanting AI on the GNOME desktop.

As part of the GNOME Foundation funded Digital Wellbeing project, the GNOME Shell for GNOME 50 has merged options to prevent unlocking the desktop session past their bed time. The intent here is on rounding out GNOME's parental controls functionality.

The GNOME 50 Alpha "50.alpha" release is now available for testing ahead of this open-source desktop's official release in March.

In preparing for the GNOME 50 Alpha release, the "50.alpha" tags just occurred for the Mutter compositor and GNOME Shell. Most notable with GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha is the X11 back-end indeed being removed to focus exclusively on the Wayland session.

A new project trying to get off the ground and currently in an "exploratory phase" is GYESME that describes itself as a "design-led" downstream of GNOME with plans ot only fork when needed that is "minimal by default."

Hitting the "1.0" milestone last summer was the GNOME AI virtual assistant app called Newelle. This third-party GNOME app has continued evolving as an AI-focused assistant on the GNOME desktop and has now rolled out MCP server support to integrate with "thousands" of other apps.

Both the GNOME desktop and Mozilla Firefox browser projects are considering disabling middle-click-paste functionality by default.

GNOME's Glycin project as the Rust-based sandboxed and extendable image loading library now supports XPM and XBM images. This is notable since those formats were the last unsandboxed image loading formats used on Fedora Linux.

GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas.