GNOME News Archives

Beyond the various local AI agent/chat options not catering to a specific desktop environment, the GNOME desktop has seen Newelle as an AI app catering to GNOME/GTK4. There's now another local AI option for the GNOME desktop with Moose.

GNOME developer Jordan Petridis published a blog post today to introduce the world to the Toolpak plans for GNOME OS.

Wisp is a new GNOME Shell extension making it easier to graphically manage Btrfs file-system snapshots.

In addition to this week's GNOME 51 release were several other exciting developments in the GNOME desktop space.

Right on schedule and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora Workstation 45, the GNOME 51 desktop is officially released.

It's been quite some time since hearing any news out of the Shotwell photo manager project for GNOME, but out today is Shotwell 33 with the long-awaited GTK4 port.

GTK 4.24 released on Friday as the newest stable feature release to the GTK4 toolkit. It's quite a nice update to GTK4 for pairing with next week's GNOME 51 desktop release.

For those in pursuit of a graphical Git client for GNOME or the Linux desktop at large, the GTK4-powered Gitte continues advancing rather well and out this week is its v0.10 release.

As a last minute change ahead of next week's GNOME 51 desktop release, changes to Mutter and gsettings-desktop-schemas have now landed for supporting custom pointer acceleration profiles.

GNOME has been working to establish a formal request for comments (RFC) process for solving major technical questions and changes moving forward. A drafted RFC is now under discussion by GNOME stakeholders for moving this process forward.

The release candidates are out today for the GNOME Shell and Mutter in preparing for the formal "GNOME 51.rc" release in the coming days.

This week was extremely eventful in the GNOME space with GPU reset recovery for GNOME Mutter now largely wrapped up and the merge request opened to facilitate the code review. There was also the announcement of the half million Euro Sovereign Tech Agency investment into Flatpak. Plus on the application side were a few more interesting advancements this week.'

Google Summer of Code 2026 featured a project working on GPU reset recovery for GNOME's Mutter compositor. GSoC has now wrapped up and the project overall was largely successful although some outstanding work remains. In this last week the merge request has been opened to conduct code review on this GPU reset recovery implementation for GNOME.

The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set.

RustConn has been in development for a while now as a modern GTK4 connection manager supporting a variety of protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, and more. RustConn 0.20 was released this week as the latest major step forward to this Rust-based connection manager leveraging the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita.

GNOME interaction designer Tobias Bernard has shared some of the plans and ideas for long-term GNOME Shell improvements they have been eyeing for future GNOME releases.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management.

GNOME Boxes as a front-end to libvirt and QEMU is preparing to deliver a much improved virtualization experience for those wanting to enjoy desktop VMs from the GNOME desktop.

Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier.

GNOME developers were quite busy in closing out the month of July from continued work on establishing a formal Request For Comments (RFC) process for the project to battling the continued flood of AI-generated GNOME Shell extensions.

Kiwi Menu as the macOS-inspired quick menu option for the GNOME Shell desktop is continuing to enhance its macOS-esque experience on GNOME.

The GNOME project is changing its handling of security reports due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated security findings.

At GNOME's annual GUADEC conference happening this week in Spain, an update was shared on the current state of GNOME OS.

GNOME developers working on GNOME OS have received funding from Germany's Prototype Fund to work on creating the GNOME OS "Developer Tool Suite" or also tentatively called their "Test Center" to help in testing experimental applications/libraries in a modern Linux computing world with systemd-sysext, Buildstream, and other newer tech.

Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window's background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code.

While typically quite rare encountering a GPU reset under Linux in most conditions, currently if encountering one under GNOME your session gets wiped out. But thanks to a Google Summer of Code "GSoC" project this year, GNOME's Mutter compositor is finally seeing real GPU reset recovery handling.

In working toward the stable GNOME 51 desktop release due out in September, today marks the alpha release of GNOME 51.

In development over the past three years has been Newelle as a GNOME-aligned AI virtual assistant. Out this week is Newelle 1.4.5 and it now adds AI image generation support and a redesigned chat interface.

Not only is GNOME 51 working to replace GNOME System Monitor with its new replacement, but over in System76's COSMIC space they have been baking their own new system monitor too.

One of the limitations of GNOME's current multi-monitor handling is that the same background is used across the displays. For those that want to enjoy per-monitor background selection, some experimental / proof-of-concept code is now working to allow such per-monitor backgrounds to work with the modern GNOME desktop.

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.