The GNOME Project has announced the Release Candidate (RC) for GNOME 48 desktop environment, leading up to the final release set for March 19th, 2025. The RC includes several new features and improvements compared to its Beta and Alpha predecessors.
One of the key enhancements is the support for the Wayland color management protocol in Mutter, the window and compositing manager. Users can now activate the Activities Overview with the Super key, alongside the default centering of new windows. A new feature, dynamic triple buffering, is also present, which aims to optimize performance on low-end GPUs, including Intel integrated graphics and Raspberry Pi systems.
The window placement improvements ensure new windows are centered effectively and also enhance NVIDIA GPU support when they serve as the primary graphics processor. Accessibility features have been upgraded, including keyboard monitoring support, and dma-bufs support for headless sessions has been enhanced. The GNOME Display Control (gdctl) utility now allows monitoring lease marking and output luminance settings adjustments.
A significant addition is the inclusion of the Nautilus file manager, which was not part of the earlier releases. Nautilus 48 facilitates the removal of bookmarks from the pathbar, introduces support for basic unit tests for the file view, and optimizes thumbnail loading.
In the GNOME Control Center (Settings), new features such as the Global Shortcuts Provider frontend dialog, HDR luminance settings UI, and enhanced synchronization with the fprintd daemon for fingerprint enrollment are introduced.
GNOME Shell has received updates allowing for notification grouping by apps and better management of default dash/grid/folder apps, along with fixes for scaling issues during the Activities Overview transition.
Moreover, notable improvements have been made to various applications within GNOME 48, including Evince (document viewer), GNOME Calendar, GNOME Maps, GNOME Remote Desktop, and GNOME Software, enhancing features and handling of errors and functions.
For those eager to test out these new features, the GNOME OS 48 ISO image can be downloaded, and additional details about the changes are available in the release announcement page.