GNOME 50 Beta Released With Stable VRR, GDM Improvements

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 13 February 2026 at 04:09 PM EST. 51 Comments

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

GNOME 50 beta highlights include:

- The Epiphany browser has addressed crashes, remote denial of service, and other issues.

- GDM has added support for a "unified" authentication mechanism in using a single PAM conversation that runs multiple authentication methods at once.

- GDM has re-introduced a timeout while waiting for a primary GPU to appear.

- Glycin now has a Rust-based JPEG 2000 image loader.

- GNOME Remote Desktop now has camera redirection support, connection throttling, Kerberos authentication support for single user run-time modes, and HiDPI support.

- The Nautilus file manager has added a Glycin dependency for thumbnailing.

- Improved dGPU detection for GNOME Shell.

- Mutter's VRR support is no longer experimental.

- Virtual monitor and HiDPI improvements for Mutter.

- Other GNOME Shell and Mutter updates.

- New default background for GNOME 50 along with other new backgrounds.

Downloads and more details on today's GNOME 50 Beta via the release announcement.