GNOME is a very widely used desktop environment which is the default one on many prominent Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora.
In a recent set of moves, GNOME received two very significant changes that will take it into newer horizons, making it a more versatile desktop environment.
The first of those moves is the introduction of support for accent colors, which we had heard of last year. Back then, I had thought that this would land just in time for the GNOME 45 release, but, that never happened.
Even Ubuntu has featured this since the 22.04 LTS release, it was surprising to see that GNOME didn't have such functionality.
Luckily, after lots of fixing, tweaking, and sharing of mockups like this☝️ We finally have what many users were wishing for.
You can take a look at the original merge request (MR) by Alice Mikhaylenko (formerly known as Alexander Mikhaylenko) for learning more about this change.
Compared to that, the MR for adding Wayland DRM lease protocol support is newer at just a month old, but, the issue has existed for more than 3 years ago now.
Fortunately, it didn't take much time to close the MR, which has been successfully merged into the main branch for GNOME.
What this makes possible is support for VR devices when using a Wayland session, Charlie Le confirmed that when they tested this patch with their HTC Vive on a Fedora GNOME installation. They confirmed that the Monado OpenXR runtime worked as expected, and even a few VR games.
This upgrade has also made way for supporting GPU hot-unplugs. You can learn more about the protocol on Wayland Explorer.
After reading all that, a question arises; When will we get to see these in action?
Well, these changes are available as patches on the GitLab repo. Those who know their way around can try testing these out.
For the rest of us, the upcoming GNOME 47 release is expected to feature these improvements, which, according to the GNOME release schedule, is planned to be introduced on 14 September 2024.
💬 What do you think of this move? Better late than never? Add your thoughts below!
