GNOME 41 Beta Introduces SIP/VoIP Support with Significant Updates to Applications

, and Ankush Das

August 24, 2021 . 8:45 PM

2 min read

While GNOME 40 was a significant upgrade, GNOME 41 is the next version bump with several improvements and new feature support.

It should be available as a stable release next month. Now, the beta version is available for public testing.

Before you choose to try it out, let us take a look at what to expect with GNOME 41:

GNOME 41 Beta: What’s New?

It is important to note that you may notice more changes or UI feature additions before the final release.

Considering its official release announcements, let me mention a few essential changes.

Start with GNOME 41; you can now manage your SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) account using the UI.

You can easily place VoIP calls using the dial pad right from the system.

Even though this is not something, every user needs, you may want to opt for a SIP account if you need to cut costs with international calls. GNOME 41 will make it easy for you to integrate the account and use it from the get-go.

There are some improvements to the Wayland support as well. For instance, you can have a Wayland session even if the login screen uses Xorg.

In addition to some of these essential improvements, some of the applications also received valuable upgrades.

Epiphany web browser now utilizes AdGuards’s script to block YouTube video advertisements. Also, with GNOME 41, support for epiphany canary builds has been added.

Other Improvements

Including all the package updates under the hood, you can observe subtle changes to the GNOME software interface, control center, and the file manager.

Also, any packages/libraries that will be removed will have to be informed one cycle in advance from this time onwards. You can learn more about it and other changes in the official release announcement.

You can start testing it out using GNOME boxes with the latest GNOME OS build or find the beta branch via Flathub beta.