GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements

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.

GNOME 51.beta was officially declared today and some of the updates to find in this new test version include:

- The GNOME Control Center added a new fingerprint management UI to the users area.

- GNOME Initial Setup gained support for systemd-homed accounts.

- GNOME Shell now honors the "reduced-motion" setting for those wanting reduced motions/visuals. There is also SVG-based cursor support in the same format handled by KDE.

- The Mutter compositor now supports the background blur effect on Wayland and various other improvements.

- GNOME Software improved the performance of icon loading and PackageKit repositories refine.

- GTK now supports the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol, reworked GDK frame-clock to improve precision and reduce frame drops, and other enhancements.

- The GVFS daemon added auto-unmount support for idle backends.

- Various small refinements to the Nautilus file manager.

- The GNOME Web Epiphany web browser has re-enabled WebRTC support, added pinning support for URLs in history and overview model, and other improvements.

- The Glycin image loading code now supports XMP in GIF, TIFF, and WebP image files. There is also now support in Glycin for the Radiance HDR format.

- GNOME Connections now enables H.264 in the Flatpak build.

- Various bug fixes and translation updates throughout.

Downloads and more details on today's GNOME 51 Beta desktop via discourse.gnome.org. The release candidate of GNOME 51 should be out around the end of August while GNOME 51.0 stable is expected to arrive on 18 September.