Many of us like GNOME for its no-nonsense, distraction-free design, which makes it easy to be productive when combined with the right tools and tips.
While we covered most features that are coming with GNOME 48, there were a few additional changes that managed to get in before the final release. With this article, we will look at both the changes we covered earlier and the new changes that got in just before the stable release.
So, let's see how this release has shaped up. 🤓
GNOME 48: What's New?
Packed with many improvements across the board, GNOME 48 focuses on refining the existing core apps and tools while also introducing some new offerings for users to play around with.
One of the most notable inclusions in this release is the new Wellbeing feature in the Settings app. It allows users to set a screen time limit to cut their exposure to computer screens that could lead to eye strain, sleep disturbances, and even decreased physical activity.
A daily limit can be set in hours and minutes, with the Grayscale option turning the screen black and white after the screen time limit has been reached. Similarly, there are eyesight reminders for reminding the user to look away from the screen and movement reminders with scheduling that dims the screen for the duration of the movement break.
The HDR setting screenshot is the work of Jonas Ådahl.
Next up are the highly anticipated Wayland Color Management and HDR support that can be used with displays conforming to the BT.2100 standard. These new bits can be accessed from the Settings app, with the HDR option only showing up when a capable monitor is connected.
In the screenshot above, you can see that Color Management was not showing me any monitor to tweak. This was because I was running GNOME OS Nightly on a virtual machine.
Moving on, the GNOME developers have managed to implement HDR Luminance settings into the Settings app. This gives greater control over how HDR content is displayed, ensuring that the brightness and contrast levels are in line with the user's monitor and their preferences.
GNOME shell has also received some upgrades that include things like a fix for a behavior where inactive periods of usage were being tracked for screen time limits, a fix for an animation glitch during overview transition, and suspend/resume handling during screen time tracking.
Closing out this section, we have the new Global Shortcuts implementation that allows sandboxed apps to register system-wide keyboard shortcuts for better accessibility and support for the Wayland Cursor Shape protocol, which improves cursor theme consistency across different compositors, resulting in a more uniform and customizable user interface.
Other Changes & Improvements
There are some other noteworthy changes that include:
Most of us will be transitioning to GNOME 48 with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releases. You can also expect Arch Linux and its derivatives like EndeavourOS and CachyOS to receive the upgrade shortly, not today, but shortly.
Users of other actively developed rolling release distros that include GNOME should likewise receive the upgrade soon.
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