Quadrapassel, the GNOME Tetris clone, has scored its first major update in nearly four years.
The headline change in Quadrapassel 49 is a long-awaited port to GTK4/libadwaita. This gives the game a modern look that fits in with the modern GNOME desktop by using the latest design conventions. The game is able to resize neatly at smaller widths too.
Touchscreen support is also plumbed in, making it possible to swipe and tap falling blocks into place with fingers, rather than hammering keyboard arrow keys.
Gameplay has been refined with ‘large improvements’ to scoring, controls and pace. Scoring now uses GNOME’s shared games library; multi-line clear rewards are better balanced; and players can set custom speeds (for frenetic gameplay).
When pausing a game, the game grid and the next-piece preview hide. This looks cleaner, but also means players can’t plan their next move while pretending to taking a break (I’ve never done that, obviously).
Contributor Charles Benca has re-engineering the way tetrominos behave. They no longer spawn in random orientations, repeat endlessly, or bug out when rotated near the ceiling. Quadrapassel now lines up much closer to classic Tetris (and its many clones).
Other tidy-ups include a new “New Game” button, using a proper dialog for the theme chooser, and the usual sort of lower-level changes that stem from updating a crusty old codebase.
Certain games just don’t age
Quadrapassel hasn’t been part of Ubuntu’s default install for over a decade but older versions of the game — along with the rest of the GNOME Games package set — remains a command away on all supported versions of the distro:
sudo apt install gnome-games
If you just want Quadrapassel:
sudo apt install quadrapassel
Linux may now boast a thriving gaming scene, with an array of of AAA titles, but sometimes all you want is five minutes of block-stacking while a download completes. Quadrapassel drops neatly into that gap.
The latest version of Quadrapassel is available to install from Flathub. Linux distributions shipping GNOME 49 may also provide it in their repos (sadly, Ubuntu 25.10 will not as the release came too late to make the freeze cut off deadline).