GNOME developer team finally announced the 49 release of this popular Linux Desktop environment!
If everything goes well, GNOME 49 will be the default desktop for Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43, and optional for Arch, Manjaro, etc Linux distributions.
The new desktop release introduced Showtime to replace Totem as the default video player, and Papers to replace Evince as the default document viewer.
Both use the GTK4 plus LibAdwaita libraries for the modern user interfaces with native look and touch friendly experience in today’s GNOME desktop.
Showtime video player
Gnome on Xorg (or Ubuntu on Xorg) is finally removed in the release, meaning there’s no longer Xorg/X11 session but only Wayland for GNOME. Though, the GDM login screen still can load other Xorg sessions, e.g., XFCE and Cinnamon.
It as well features new accessibility menu in login screen, with Quick Settings style buttons to toggle access to screen keyboard, screen reader, etc tools.
And, user can now control music playback and power-off/restart (though not enabled by default) from the lock screen.
GNOME 49 also improved Remote Desktop support, by adding multi-touch input support for client device with touch-screen, relative mouse input for better 3D app or gaming experience, and ability to have additional virtual monitors even when there aren’t additional displays physically present.
The image loading and the background wallpaper now are handled by the Glycin library, which is sandboxed to help prevent security exploits.
And, the release now supports changing the display brightness in the Quick Settings when HDR is enabled. While, these new HDR brightness controls support external displays, and allow multiple displays to be adjusted at the same time.
There are also many improvements to the Gnome Weather, Gnome Maps, Gnome Calendar apps, as well as following changes:
- Move “Do Not Distrub” to Quick Settings.
- Indicate when Preserve Battery Health enabled.
- New wallpapers for HDR displays.
- Improved Flatpak app data parsing for GNOME Software.
- New option to disable “Super” shortcut key.
- Support relative dials on tablet pads.
- Hardware accelerated video encoding for Camera app.
- Add ‘Donate’ button in About page.
- Add configuration for pointing stick (aka TrackPoint)
For more about GNOME 49, see the official release note.
Get GNOME 49
As mentioned above, GNOME 49 will be available in Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43, etc Linux Distributions. And, Arch has already made the new release into GNOME Unstable repository.
For choice, there’s GNOME OS Nightly available for trying it out in either virtual machine (only support Gnome Boxes) or real hardware.
