GNOME 46 REVIEW: the shape of things to come!

Head to to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code thelinuxexperiment Grab a brand new laptop or desktop running Linux: # 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to: - a Daily Linux News show - a weekly patroncast for more personal thoughts - polls on the next topics I cover, - your name in the credits YouTube: @thelinuxexp/join Patreon: Or, you can donate whatever you want: Liberapay: 👕 GET TLE MERCH Support the channel AND get cool new gear: 🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! 🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE: Website: Mastodon: @thelinuxEXP Pixelfed: PeerTube: Discord: #Linux #GNOME #GNOME46 #linuxdesktop #linuxdistro Timecodes: 00:00 Intro 00:36 Sponsor: Squarespace 01:36 Desktop Improvements 04:59 Nautilus changes 06:47 New Settings 08:51 Apps changes 11:12 Parting Thoughts 13:33 Sponsor: Tuxedo 14:54 Support the channel The main thing you’ll enjoy here is some redesigned notifications. These will now show a header, to let you know which app spawned that notification, and they’ll include a little symbolic icon as well. On top of that, notifications that are pretty long, or have action buttons can also be expanded, or collapsed. Experimental support for variable refresh rate is here, it’s turned off by default, and you’ll have to use dconf to turn it on. Once you do that, you’ll get a switch for that feature in the Display settings, provided your display supports it, with a “preferred refresh rate“ list. (gsettings set experimental-features “[’variable-refresh-rate’]“) Another change is in how fonts are rendered using fractional scaling: they’re now less blurry, and will look more consistent. Other, smaller changes include the ability to press control super and a number to launch the associated app from your dock. You also get remote login using RDP. The file manager, Nautilus, got way better in this release. First, you can now click the path bar to edit the location manually, instead of having to press control L to do so. Next is search: it now performs much faster than it used to, and the search button now does a global search directly. When transferring files, the progress bar has been moved to the bottom of the sidebar. Changing a folder icon is now much easier as well, you can just open its properties, and you have a little edit icon. In the settings, there’s a new “system“ page. The mouse and touchpad settings now let you configure how you trigger the right click. You can also turn off the touchpad when typing, or disable that setting if you don’t like it. The GNOME Online accounts also received some love, notably for its backend: it now uses the default browser for authentication into accounts. You can also add a WebDAV account to get access to contacts, calendars and files, and you can add a Microsoft Personal Account as well. GNOME Software, the app store, now shows the Verified badges on Flathub applications that have them. GNOME Calendar gained performance improvements, which it sort of needed, and it now displays the current month a lot more visibly in the month view, so you always know where you are. The image viewer, Loupe, now has a keyboard shortcut to permanently delete an image, it’s shift delete. Epiphany, the web browser, now automatically retrieves app names and icons from websites using their progressive web apps manifests if they have one, so everything will already be nice and tidy when you create a web app from the browser. It also fixes some issues with how it syncs with your Firefox account, and it gained support for smart card authentication as well, meaning you can authenticate using USB devices while using Epiphany. GNOME Maps moved their controls to the bottom of the application, and gained improvements to the vector map layer, although this one is still experimental. It also improved how favourite places work, with a default empty state explaining what favourites are. Finally, GNOME Music has been ported to use the latest libadwaita widgets, and it removed support for scrobbling, and the song list view. it also gained a preferences dialogue, which doesn’t contain much, but still lets you set the repeat mode, enable replayGain, or inhibit suspend when playing music.