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⇱ GNOME 49 Beta Ships Many Last Minute Features - Including Greater systemd Reliance - Phoronix


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GNOME 49 Beta Ships Many Last Minute Features - Including Greater systemd Reliance

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 15 August 2025 at 06:07 PM EDT. 31 Comments
The GNOME 49 beta release is out this Friday evening as the next stepping stone on the path to GNOME 49 in September. Making the GNOME 49 Beta release even more notable is that it's the 28th birthday of GNOME.

It was on this day in 1997 that Miguel de Icaza announced the start of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 49 beta shipped today with many last minute feature changes in addition to countless bug fixes and translation updates.

- The GNOME Foundry is in its v1.0 beta state as "an IDE in a box" with command line tooling.

- The GDM display manager has switched to using dynamic users for greeter sessions, which enables systemd-based session management on the greeter and removes the dependency on dbus-daemon.

- The Glycin image library now supports saving JPEG-XL images and CICP support for HEIC and AVIF formats.

- GNOME Initial Setup brings increased reliance on systemd.

- GNOME Session is no longer started via shell script but is all now baked into C code. There is also enhanced systemd integration.

- GNOME Shell brings media controls to the lock screen.

- GNOME Shell also adds restart/shutdown support to the lock screen.

- Mutter now supports the Wayland pointer warp protocol.

- Mutter Wayland ICC profile support and backlight improvements.

- The Nautilus file manager has redesigned the search popover.

- GNOME Snapshot now prefers H.264/MP4 format when possible. There is also now support for hardware video encoding.

- Many GTK bug fixes.

- The new default wallpapers have landed for GNOME 49. Here's the light version:

👁 GNOME 49 light wallpaper


Downloads and more details on the GNOME 49 Beta via GNOME.org.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.