The final stable GNOME 40 release is now officially available to download.
Six months of fastidious development has gone into making the latest release of the GNOME desktop the best one yet. In all, GNOME 40 is composed of a colossal 24,571 commits from roughly 822 different contributors.
The many GNOME 40 features include a new design for the overview screen, a horizontal workspace switcher, and new features in a crop of apps, including the Nautilus file manager.
The desktop also now boots to the overview screen by default, meaning users aren’t left staring at an empty state.
We spotlighted these (and many other changes) in a recent article but suffice to say, there’s a sizeable set of enhancements on offer here, including:
- Various design changes
- Workspaces are now horizontal
- Dash is at the bottom screen edge
- New touchpad gestures for entering overview
- New touchpad gestures for switching workspaces
- Improved keyboard shortcut settings
- Compose key setting
- ‘About’ settings shows hardware vendor/model number
- Software app has a new carousel on homepage
- App lists in Software now show version history
- Nautilus can extract password-protected
.ziparchives - Weather app has a new design
- Maps scales for use on mobile
- Improved tabs in Epiphany/GNOME Web
You can see some of the improvements listed above in these screenshots:
For more details on this release check out the GNOME 40 mini-site. The official GNOME 40 release video showcases many of these new features can be watched on YouTube.