GNOME 44 is codenamed "Kuala Lumpur"
After six months of development, the launch of the new version of the popular desktop environment GNOME 44 And in this new release, a large number of changes and improvements have been added, as well as various bug fixes.
This version brings a grid view in file picker, improved settings panels for sdevice security, accessibility and refined quick settings in the shell.
Main news of GNOME 44 Kuala Lumpur
In this new version of GNOME 44 that is presented we can find that added a mode to display the contents of directories in the form of a grid of icons to the dialog box open in GNOME applications to select files. By default, the classic file list view is still used and a separate button has appeared on the right side of the panel to switch to icon mode. The new dialog is only available in applications translated to GTK4 and it is not available in programs that are still in GTK3.
The configurator has redesigned "Device Security" page, the new version uses simple descriptions to show security status such as “Test passed”, “Test failed”, or “Device is protected”. For those who need access to technical details, a detailed device status report has been added, which can be useful when sending problem notifications.
In addition to this, it is also highlighted that the parameter setting interface has been redesigned for people with disabilities, the section also has new settings: enable exceed threshold volume; keyboard-related options for people with disabilities; area to test the cursor blink settings; the ability to enable constant visibility of scrollbars.
Another of the changes that stands out in the new version of GNOME 44 is that the configurator section has been updated related with sound settings, since one was provided option to disable alert sound and added a separate window to browse through the available alert sounds.
The configurator panel has been redesigned with mouse and trackpad options, a visual video demonstration is provided explaining the differences between the available options. Added a new window to test the settings. Added a new option to adjust mouse cursor acceleration.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- On the panel with the wireless access settings, it was possible to transfer the Wi-Fi password by displaying a QR code.
- The network configuration panel offers the possibility to configure VPN Wireguard.
- The system information section shows the kernel and firmware versions.
- Improved menu with buttons to quickly change the most used settings and evaluate their current status. For Bluetooth, a separate menu with a list of connected devices has been added, through which you can quickly connect or disconnect the necessary device.
- Added a list of apps (so far only installed in Flatpak format) that run in the background without opening a window.
The application manager speeds up the display of software categories and reduces situations that require page reloads. - Optimized the design of reviews and error messages.
- Improved Flatpak format support and automatic removal of unused Flatpak runtimes.
Nautilus has returned the ability to quickly expand directories to list mode, allowing you to view the contents of a directory without actually going into it. - Added support for pinning tabs, moving a tab to a new window, and moving files to a tab.
GNOME Maps provides image extraction from places from Wikidata and Wikipedia.
Added support for editable keyboard shortcuts to the Builder IDE and implemented new keyboard shortcuts. - Continued to transition apps to using GTK 4 and the libadwaita library, which provides ready-to-use widgets and objects for building apps that are compliant with the new GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) and can scale to any size screen.
- The GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter's composition manager have been completely converted to use the GTK4 library and get rid of the heavy reliance on GTK3.
To quickly assess the capabilities of GNOME 44, specialized live builds based on openSUSE and a ready-made installation image are provided as part of the GNOME OS initiative.
GNOME 44 is also included in experimental versions of Ubuntu 23.04 and Fedora 38.